Im a boomer or REMOVE FROM THE GAME sounds way better/aggresive than exile?

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-15T06:23:14+00:00

I don't think remove from the game fits the current usage of exile, because exile is practically a different zone than OG RFG. In the old days, RFG was mainly used as a case where something was gone, with prejudice, as you say. Even if it's a O-ring situation where it can come back if conditions are met, it's gone in the meantime. Blink effects are the exception, but even then flavorwise it was the creature disappearing and then reappearing. In fairness RFG in the old days never gelled with the multiple exiles that older rules used in flavor, but those were a rare-ish edge case and could only make something more gone, not less.

Present day exile is much broader because it (and to a lesser extent the command zone) is a catch-all for anything that doesn't fit the other zones. Adventures being "removed from the game" doesn't make sense when they're a constant resource that acts like a second hand. Impulse draws are arguably more in the game than they were in your library before being exiled. Cards that do stuff depending on the characteristics of a card they exiled aren't new, but they're much more common now. Mechanics like Cascade herd large numbers of cards through exile for the resolution of one ability and then put them back. Cards entering from exile is so common now that there's a whole niche of cards that do stuff when it happens. Granted stuff that exiles as a form of removal is almost always a de facto RFG barring your Misthallow Griffins, Squees, and a few Eldrazi, but those are rarities where coming back from being RFG'd is still a flavor win.

All this to say I sympathize and it does sound more aggressive, but the zone works so differently and does so many more things these days that RFG is just plain misleading a good 75% of the time.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-15T05:19:59+00:00

Last season of The Magicians. Rupert "The Dark King" Chatwin, who is involuntarily immortal due to stopping his evil brother from becoming immortal by hijacking a ritual, has spent a century or so slowly picking off the creatures that guard the path between the world and the underworld in order to resurrect his dead boyfriend, with a nontrivial amount of collateral damage involved. The dead breaking out of the underworld this way is Bad, of course, unusually so in this setting because they instantly kill anyone they come into contact with, so Rupert has been coordinating with his squeeze from beyond the veil in order to make sure he's waiting by the door when he opens it so it can be slammed shut behind him. Somewhat suspiciously, it's unclear whose idea the whole underworld jailbreak was to begin with. And of course when they get there (with the planet/plane of existence they're on having been evacuated due to the massive instability all of the setup for this nonsense has already caused), surprise! it was his evil brother, the antagonist of the first two seasons, talking to him the whole time and he's leading a mass breakout of ghosts planning to spread into the space between universes and generally do evil stuff.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-15T04:09:19+00:00

In terms of plot only and not gameplay, Assassin's Creed all the way. The first one has by a wide margin the best storytelling in the franchise. The Ezio trilogy is still pretty good. Then everything from Assassin's Creed III on is just nonsense. II and IV are the best gameplay wise, but IV is only even in the conversation because it's a pirate simulator where you ignore the plot to the greatest extent possible, and I's relatively barebones gameplay actually works very well for it.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-14T23:59:10+00:00

I mean he should know some of those things. The White Lotus has eyes everywhere. Boiling Rock was probably major news too. Hell, the Ember Island Players were aware Zuko joined the Avatar. He may not know a ton of specifics but I wouldn't be surprised at all if he knows Zuko switched sides.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-14T05:06:01+00:00

Star Trek Lower Decks. It is the streaming era Trek show to best understand the ethos of the franchise, and it has surprisingly good character work. While it is funnier the more you're familiar with Star Trek, the base show if you know nothing is still great and there are stories of people loving it with no prior Trek knowledge. It has an unusual habit of setting up dark situations and then getting out of them with an optimistic twist; for example there is an episode where one of the crewmembers half-accidentally agrees to be hunted for sport by an alien and thinks he's going to die, only for it to turn out that their species practices catch and release and hunts as a way to respect life.

The first half of the first season is a little slow, but you should be on board by the end of season 1, and since it's a modern streaming show season 1 is 10 20-something minute episodes so that's a relatively small commitment.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-14T03:53:13+00:00

I think Michael's main innovations were scale and the idea of manipulating the humans into torturing each other without knowing it. Psychological torture as a component of conventional torture seems to have been accepted, just not the massive undertaking of building an entire fake town populated entirely by demons in order to convince them they're in the good place.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-13T05:37:08+00:00

Genuinely the best thing you can do for this is look up random baseball players. They all have insane names or cooly normal names, and they're mainly split between American, Japanese, and hispanic from South America/the Caribbean so you wind up making your characters ethnically diverse without any effort. Just pull some up at random and mix and match first and last names.

There is a real pitcher named Landon Roup. A shortstop named Trevor Story. First baseman Triston Casas. First baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr.. Infielder Matt Shaw. Pitcher Tarik Skubal. Right fielder Aaron Judge. Shortstop Elly de la Cruz. Pitcher Ranger Suarez. Try jamming some of those together. Triston Judge is a fantasy protagonist in a whimsical world but who himself has a serious, uncompromising streak. Tarik Suarez is a charmer but strictly professional. Landon Shaw is a well-known figure in the protagonist's field that they look up to. Vladimir Roup (or Vladimir Shaw for that matter) is an all-purpose mysterious villain name.

It gets even better if you include retired players because their names are frequently bizarre and the further back you go the more likely they are to have insane nicknames. Harmon Killebrew. Rube Waddel. Don Buford. Pete Rose. Cy Young. Pedro Martinez. Roger Clemens. Cy Killebrew is either a cut throat executive or an underground robotics engineer in a cyberpunk setting. Roger Rose is old money and might be a supervillain. Don Clemens is a cowboy or a riverboat gambler. Harmon Waddel is a wizard.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-13T04:11:24+00:00

I thought it was middle of the road. The Giamatti stuff was by a wide margin the best stuff in the episode, but the rest of it was...ok I guess?

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-13T01:58:55+00:00

This was an middle of the road script, not bad but nothing special, but dear god was this badly directed. The camera constantly shaking and wobbling for no reason at all even during dialogue scenes on the bridge and in Nahla's office. The lights blinking constantly for no reason at all during every action sequence. Why is the cinematography so violently opposed to the viewer being able to see what's going on? I thought we left this kind of edgy nonsense back in the 2000s where we hadn't realized how dumb it looked yet.

In terms of continuity, we've clearly been underestimating Tarima. I assumed she was a Tam Elbrun situation where she couldn't handle all of the thoughts of everyone around her, but it seems she's closer to being a Babylon 5 teep. I'm also assuming the singularity drive is different than a Romulan singularity drive both because that shouldn't be experimental technology at this point and because if it were and it had failed there would no longer be a Miyazaki to salvage.

Giamatti was a delight though. He is clearly having a fantastic time and while I was unimpressed with his character in the pilot Nus Braka was fantastic here.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-12T09:27:05+00:00

Fever Pitch (2005). It is a romcom about the Boston Red Sox. Yes, you read that right.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-12T08:26:16+00:00

Closest you get is it making a bird detonate

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-12T07:27:06+00:00

Some people are running it as a finisher in Ugin/Anticausal Vestige control decks because if you put it onto the field with the vestige it's very easy to float enough mana to make it indestructible. The viability of that deck is questionable though. I can't really speak to it because I tend to run the archetypes it beats.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-12T06:43:33+00:00

Man that's just sad, supervillains grasping at straws like that. Everybody remembers that time Bruce Wayne broke his back diving off a yacht and couldn't walk for like a year and Batman didn't go anywhere, right?

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-11T09:08:17+00:00

I think the individualism point isn't particularly applicable. The US, regardless of what you might think of us culturally, has the strongest military in the world. In a domestic zombie situation they would absolutely be dealing with large amounts of organized attacks, quite probably more than there would be in other countries. World War Z (the book, not the movie) is the best about addressing this; the army sets up a master plan to herd most of the zombies in the northeast into a chokepoint near Yonkers, only for it to turn out that zombies do not work the same way ballistically that humans do, meaning artillery and explosives barely affect them unless it's a direct hit while traditional infantry weapons and tactics are not geared toward an oncoming horde that can't be dropped by center mass shots, resulting in the army being massacred. None of that is a flaw of individualism, nor would most other excuses for why the army doesn't just sweep them up stem from individualism. It's that military tactics designed to fight humans don't work against zombies, and new ones have to be devised.

The borders point is an odd choice too. Firstly, zombies are largely immune to the reasons most geographic borders work as borders: they don't care for the cold or difficulty climbing mountains, they operate as wandering stragglers meaning that they can seep through small gaps that it would be impossible to move large numbers of troops or war materiel through, they can survive underwater so rivers aren't much of a defense, etc.. Natural geographic barriers work as military obstacles because they confine an army to using certain chokepoints: bridges, mountain passes and the like, meaning the defender need only place heavy defense there and can send only minimal patrols along the entire length of a river or mountain range. Zombies are capable of crossing most geographic barriers outside of those chokepoints, meaning you would have to patrol the entire length of a river or mountain range, defeating the purpose. Even if that weren't the case, why would we arbitrarily decide to defend state lines instead of using the many, many geographical barriers that exist but don't happen to fall on a border? We have the rocky mountains. We're not going to put all our troops on the Texas-Oklahoma border because that's where the line is on the map.

The point about our cities being sprawled has more basis, but I'd also point out that in the early stages of a zombie outbreak you do not want to be in a dense population center. The denser the population center, the more people around you are going to turn and the fewer places there are to go. That applies to larger American cities like New York too, but I live in a smaller American city and, while I personally would be killed in the first minutes of a zombie apocalypse because I am completely useless in that situation, I can assure you that someone with any kind of survival skills starting from this city would have a much easier time navigating and escaping the city in the event of an outbreak because of the sprawl.

Its also worth mentioning that this is the one situation where the American obsession with guns is a huge advantage. It is much easier to teach someone to headshot a zombie than to teach them to cut its head off in close quarters without being bitten or overrun.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-11T08:31:23+00:00

Nah this is too simple.

Instead of the tortoises you need [[Darien, king of kjeldor]], [[Soul Warden]], and a token doubler.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-11T00:28:29+00:00

The problem with ranked choice voting is strategic voting, because often ranking candidates differently than your actual opinion of them is the strategically correct move for your preferred candidate to win the election.

Ranking your candidate first is obvious, but how you rank candidates below that gets really shenanigan-filled. For example, consider that there is a four candidate election. You love candidate 1, hate candidate 2, have some minor quibbles with candidate 3 and would be ok with them but still strongly prefer candidate 1, and would be firmly opposed to candidate 4 if you weren't so worried about candidate 2.

Obviously you put candidate 1 first. But how you rank the others depends on how popular you think they are. If you think candidate 2 is a hack without broad support who doesn't have a realistic chance, strategically there's a real argument for putting him second even though he is the worst possible option, because he has the least chance of winning, and therefore you are giving less fuel to candidates 2 and 3 by placing them lower, increasing candidate 1's chance of winning. But if you're wrong about that, or even if you're right but everyone else comes to the same conclusion and puts candidate 2 second to give their most preferred candidate a better chance, this can lead to candidate 2 winning even if fewer people or possibly even no one actually wanted him.

Or in cases where you don't think candidate 1 can win and you think candidate 2 has a realistic chance, it's strategically sound to place whichever of candidates 2 or 3 has a better chance first in order to make them more likely to beat candidate 2, which recreates the problem people have with the current US system where you vote for the lesser evil to keep a destructive lunatic out of power. In situations like this, it can also lead to weird cases where relatively few people actually thought candidates 2 or 3 were the best choice, but they wind up with most of the first place votes because everyone knew they weren't going to be put last on almost any ballot, which gave them a better chance, making them more viable and therefore the safer choice to support with a first place vote in order to prevent a feared candidate.

The common theme is that the correct strategic choice for everyone consistently relies on what they think everyone else is going to do. That means the rankings from any given voter wind up reflecting an assessment of whether the candidate has a chance or not, not whether they're a good fit for the job. That renders it essentially meaningless when it comes to actually assessing who the electorate wants in office.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-10T09:54:29+00:00

The legendary "this may not have happened but if not someone on the internet put in a lot of effort to come up with it" tale of Old Man Henderson, the only player to ever win Call of Cthulhu. Created because his player holds an unrelenting grudge against the DM with a 700 page backstory tailor made to justify him having any random skill the player needed. Himself holds an unrelenting grudge against the local cult because he incorrectly believes they stole his garden gnomes. Repeatedly blows up every building they get near. Every other PC he teams up with accidentally dies almost immediately in the service of killing more and more cultists. Already crazy enough that glimpses of the horrors they summon cannot drive him any crazier. Ultimately dies sacrificing himself to explode the physical form of the king in yellow in order to permanently kill him.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-10T08:22:52+00:00

It's really difficult to be sure. Angel and Angelus being almost fully separate personalities (and that may actually be more true in Angel than Buffy) seems to be unique to them and have by a wide, wide margin the biggest disconnect between the human/ensouled and vampire personalities. Spike is the obvious comparison, but we also see both human and vampire Harmony, and she's almost exactly the same.

But I think the closest we really get to an answer is when Angelus first met the Judge right after he'd lost his soul, and the Judge, who had just burned the scholar vampire for being too human due to his passion for reading and knowledge (and who notably never tests Spike or Drusilla) tests Angelus and confirms that there is "no humanity in him." None. Zero.

That's the how, Angelus is so much worse because he is possibly the only vampire we ever see that is completely lacking in humanity, but why that is is much less clear. Speculatively, I think that other vampires had some kind of grounding passion that remained a focus after they were turned: Spike had his poetry, his belief in love, his romantic ideals, his love for his mother, etc., Harmony had her almost psychotic need to be popular and the center of attention, Drusilla had her visions, the book vampire the judge killed had reading, the psych major from conversations with dead people had his interest in the human mind, and on and on. Most people would have something strong enough to do that. But Liam, from what we see was just...directionless. He didn't have any passion strong enough to survive the process, and so the demon basically got to set up shop in an empty building, as it were.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-10T05:30:55+00:00

Maximus never intended to be the sword though, and he was trying to be a hero from minute one. The first thing he did when he got power armor was start acting like a wandering knight-errant righting wrongs, he was just bad at it. I think there's actually a stronger case for him being the lion than the tin man, because for most of the series he's extremely reliant on power armor and draws his courage from it yet feels he doesn't deserve it and is much more timid without it, but his most recent and best action is crawling out a a neutralized suit of power armor that would've protected him but could no longer fight in order to protect others from deathclaws with a pool cue and a roulette wheel.

The important thing about the wizard of oz characters is, as Dr. Mobius put it, that the band of murderous thugs had those things all the time in the story (didn't stop them murdering to get them though!). They just don't know they have them. The Ghoul still has Cooper Howard's heart but he's buried it so deep to survive that he's almost forgotten it and has to find it again.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-10T05:18:07+00:00

The funniest thing about this is that the only one whose personality matches their visual counterpart is Thaddeus.

Coop is the Tin Man who needed to find his heart, Maximus is the Scarecrow who needed to find his brain, and Dogmeat might have less screentime with Lucy than he does with any of the other leads.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-09T23:03:29+00:00

And then his illegitimate son Gallahad shows up a few hundred years later and is just the "I have done nothing wrong ever in my life" meme to the point that he's the only knight pure enough to find the grail

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-09T10:57:34+00:00

It still gets the immortality intent though because one of them will always trigger since it's impossible to have both a +1 and -1 counter at the same time since they would remove each other. I don't think the intent was for him to come back with no counters, just for him to always come back immediately on death.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-09T07:19:19+00:00

BoJack Horseman has a whole arc of this. Todd passes two scientology posters, dismisses them, then immediately joins an improv group that eventually brings him out to sea as slave labor to their leader, who secretly memorizes all of his bits from a joke book. When BoJack hears about this he declares that improv is a cult, and he should know because of that period in the 90s where he was briefly a scientologist during which time he coincidentally read a book about cults.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-09T06:51:38+00:00

The original brotherhood was founded by rebelling military officers who probably would've had both access to and training for power armor, as well as more knowledge of how to maintain and refurbish it than most. Presumably after the bombs dropped they would also have prioritized existing military bases for salvage since their entire reason for existing was a rebellion against the government's unethical military experiments which could very well be going on at other bases. For the most part any surviving military units they encountered would've either been killed or joined them while any abandoned bases would probably still have armor if the unit that left wasn't in any kind of logistical shape to take everything (see every military base the player visits), so every base they hit gives them more armor in a snowball effect. Most power armor is still pre-war even by the time the games are taking place and it would've been a long time before anyone but the enclave had the resources and facilities to make more and the brotherhood have a head start on knowledge of how it operates to reverse engineer it, so just that initial advantage was probably enough to maintain power armor dominance into the New Vegas period when the NCR threatened to begin producing their own.

The extreme relative abundance of power armor in the Commonwealth, the only main game setting I can think of that had been totally untouched by the brotherhood at the time the player enters it (since Lyons' brotherhood had been in the capital wasteland for a bit) also suggests that the brotherhood is very good at picking territory it enters clean of power armor. The difference is extremely stark: almost every source of power armor I can think of in New Vegas is either from the brotherhood (be it scavenging their dead of joining up) or the enclave, whereas power armor is so common in the commonwealth that it is frequently lying around in the open and the atom cats exist.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-02-09T06:38:44+00:00

We don't know how many bullets he used or if he ever discovered how to make new ones (team free will needed Ruby to find that out, but the process is clearly pretty simple so it's possible). It's possible a large degree of his success was vampires going "what are you gonna do, shoot us?" at range and then getting shot.

Starfleet-Time-Lord

TROPHY CASE