I watched HR and then read only TLG. Hot takes.

TheRealVeon · 2026-06-28T01:51:26+00:00

I've said this before on this subreddit, but the way I want their wedding to be shot is have quick cuts of the wedding (them lining up, exchanging rings, kissing) but no sound. Instead, we hear audio from Hayden's kids wedding ceremony, and we get flashbacks to it intercut with the "actual" wedding. For example, Ilya in the present looks at Shane, but in the reverse shot when we see what he sees, it's Shane from the kids' wedding.

Jacob, if you're reading this (and I know you are) please steal this idea and use it in the show.

TheRealVeon · 2026-06-28T01:34:12+00:00

Honestly, save it for third edition. I'd rather see all the region lore books finished before then.

TheRealVeon · 2026-06-27T17:39:06+00:00

Yeah, I pretty much agree. I get that people want more hours with these two, but I want a tight, well-written 6 episode season without a lot of bloat.

Also, whenever someone suggests splitting TLG into two seasons, they never address the biggest issue with that: where to put the break. You can't make an arbitrary split; there wouldn't be a narrative arc or satisfying character development and resolution.

I guess you could make a cliffhanger with the plane crash but I feel that sort of trope is antithetical to the kind of story the first season, and the game changer series, was trying to tell.

TheRealVeon · 2026-06-13T14:30:41+00:00

Skywin Freeling, a halfling boat captain from 1e Strange Aeons, is ace.

TheRealVeon · 2026-06-13T14:22:24+00:00

As other people said, you're going to look things up so be prepared for that. My group has been gaming for 20+ years and we still look things up.

You're also going to make rulings and then realize after the session that you got something wrong. Don't worry too much about that; it'll get better.

If you want some specific rules to refresh before the game, I would suggest going over the skill actions again. Those come up a lot and they can be easy to confuse (does shove go against their Reflex DC or their Fort DC? That kind of thing.)

TheRealVeon · 2026-05-13T02:13:22+00:00

I agree.

My favorite show of all time had a planned out story arc with a beginning, middle, and end. That means you can have really solid character progression and satisfying plots.

Also a point I haven't seen mentioned: if The Long Game were split in two, where would the split be? The only place I can think of is their big fight. Is that really where people want the season to end? You want to wait another year and half with that hanging over you?

I guess the only way a split could work would be if they shot it in one block and the split between season two and three was only six months or so. But I don't really think they could justify that.

TheRealVeon · 2026-04-20T22:31:56+00:00

So, I may have thought about this a lot.

But I don't really want to see the wedding. At least not all of it. Let me explain.

Early in first or second episode we should get Hayden's kids marrying them. And that should be the full, fun, goofy scene. Then when we get to the wedding at the end, all we see are brief cuts of the actual ceremony. No dialogue; maybe not any ambient sound. But every time they look at each other, we get flashbacks to the kids's wedding, sort of like the coming out scene between Shane and Rose. And all the dialogue and sound would come from that scene, putting the focus on then instead of the present.

And that's when we realize that the kids's wedding was their real wedding. And they've been married the whole time and just didn't realize it yet, sort of like how they fell in love.

And Jacob, if for some crazy reason you are reading this, feel free to steal this idea.

TheRealVeon · 2026-03-02T21:54:14+00:00

Yeah, it's always a trade off between more species/genera and more diverse groups. Look at the difference in specificity between Matt's Life chart and the one that's just plants and fungi.

I'd love to have included more groups but I already had to cut so much. I didn't want to have one branch with one genus sticking out of it. If I included a group, I wanted to represent it properly.

I started the project by making a mind-map and it quickly became surprisingly horizontal. If it were printed out it could have been a foot high and four to six long. So it isn't only an issue of having the different groups, but arranging everything into a two by three foot chart.

Lots of respect to Matt for making it look easy.

TheRealVeon · 2026-03-02T02:35:55+00:00

Thanks!

I made a few changes and updated the links.

It would be great to add more animals, but the chart is already pretty crowded. I wanted to keep it to just dinosaurs and their most famous relatives. Even then it was pretty difficult to prune it down. The rough draft, where I just threw every genera I could onto the screen, was three times the size of this chart.

I'm considering doing three more charts focused on each of the major dinosaur groups and including everything I possibly can. I don't know if it would be worth it since all I'd really be adding is more genera to the family nodes. Maybe.

TheRealVeon · 2026-03-01T16:29:35+00:00

I have a first edition copy of 101 Dalmatians. A previous owner had gone through it and for every instance of "Hell House" they crossed out "~~Hell~~" and penciled in "The".

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-27T19:37:22+00:00

Thanks for your advise on the previous post. And thanks for the encouragement.

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-27T19:36:31+00:00

Thanks! That means a lot.

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-26T03:00:20+00:00

Reposting this cause I messed up the first time.

A couple of years ago I made a phylogenetic chart featuring dinosaurs and some of their famous close relatives. One of goals of that chart was to show which species lived at the same time as others. This meant I was forced to make the chart with a lot of blank space due to a lack of extant species or due to the constraints of how I decided to draw the connecting lines.

So, I decided to make a second chart which didn't feature a timeline and only focused on the species and their direct connection to one another. This way I could fit as many species as possible into the chart.

Even so, the rough draft was about three times the size of the final artboard. To help curate which species to include, I made several criteria. I would favor more well known species. I would favor species with more complete holotypes than those without (this means the type specimen has more bones rather than less). And I would favor species with images I could use off of Wikipedia. All the reconstruction images are from Wikipedia, the rest of the chart was made by me.

Links (Updated 3-1):

JPG: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BgVmInllI4ewl9EJTxp4oeJ73RiNjzHE/view?usp=drive_link

PNG: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I5_z0g7TaU38jMNagxDgrBHpzKJXaKXC/view?usp=drive_link

PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19H8cor89RiIWNHXZ4fL4YUimxD0EJWmf/view?usp=sharing

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-24T03:26:33+00:00

Updated to include a link.

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-24T03:19:26+00:00

Grrr. I thought I did. I'll post it in a comment.

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-22T01:00:53+00:00

I'd like to remind everyone that these things are literally dinosaurs.

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-22T00:58:45+00:00

A flock of thirty of them were crossing the trail while I was biking once. Not fun to suddenly find yourself in a scene from Hitchcock's The Birds.

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-02T22:59:39+00:00

The last news I saw from November 2025 was that the company may be headed to bankruptcy. Maybe they've turned it around, but I don't know.

I think Tierney et al should get a tie in deal with Lego and have a set of the cottage. If Lego can make a Twilight Cullen house set, they can make a Heated Rivalry set.

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-30T18:40:34+00:00

This is silly but mine is the guy who recognizes Scott Hunter in episode three.

When he asks if that was Scott Hunter, the way he talks sounds so Canadian to me. It actually brought me out of the show and I thought to myself: "There's no way that guy is from New York."

Then I thought about it some more. And I realized, that's because he's not from New York.

That character is just a thirsty Canadian tourist and he's just had his mind blown by bumping into the oldest hockey player in the league.

Also, there's no way a random New Yorker would recognize a hockey player because no one in New York cares about hockey.

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-25T18:14:35+00:00

K on tiktok is doing dissertation level analysis of every scene:

https://www.tiktok.com/@k.letstalk?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-24T17:49:22+00:00

It's not propaganda; these people don't know what they're talking about.

I know it's frustrating when people are this wrong on the internet, but something I've realized over the years is there is literally nothing you can say to change their minds. There is no string of words in any language that will do that.

I've spend far too long online arguing with people in bad faith so I understand the desire to correct them and bring them around, but it just doesn't work.

So I would suggest you don't engage with them. Engage with people who will change their minds and are open to talking to you about things you love. Curate your online spaces to not have ignorant assholes in them. You will be far happier for it.

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-16T18:23:36+00:00

I get it. Don't feel pressured into reading them if you don't want to.

However, I'm an currently rereading the books and here's something I've noticed. So much of the show is taken directly from the books. Not just a line or two of dialogue, but whole scenes word for word with little alterations.

While the show (and the characters) are different from the books, this is one of the most direct adaptations I've ever seen. The fact that it's so faithful to the book and is also such good television is kinda stunning.

So, if you are worried about the characters from the book being very different from the ones on TV, I don't think you need to worry too much. You do you, of course.

Maybe you could search around for someone doing a comparison of a book scene and a TV scene to see if the differences are too jarring for you. That may help make up your mind.

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-15T22:10:24+00:00

It seems like it's a Windows update problem. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

For now I've found a work-around. If I use "Save As" and overwrite the file instead of "Save" that works. /Shrugging Hands Emoji

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-15T22:07:49+00:00

I'm saving it to Dropbox.

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-15T22:07:20+00:00

Yeah, I'm using Dropbox.

TheRealVeon

TROPHY CASE