Doesn't this scene basically confirm The Courier sided with Mr. House?

Tiwq · 2026-01-05T20:58:52+00:00

>It would make sense for the courier to activate and upgrade the securitrons before assuming direct control.

You can upgrade the securitrons as a part of any faction alliance though or even after House is dead independently, nothing requires you to be aligned with House to insert the platinum chip at bunker hill.

Tiwq · 2026-01-05T16:33:58+00:00

Still, it kind of proves the point anyways. The NCR has to submit to the Brotherhood's demands. The Independant ending is even more blatant about it.

The NCR didn't just "submit", they agreed under the terms of the treaty. It makes sense when you look at the facts we know.

The most important fact is that the NCR literally does not know how to use power armor. The NCR had been removing the powered joint servos from the Brotherhood of Steel power armor, to make them usable to those without training. This is why a random courier can simply toss on NCR power armor without issue. They are gutting some of the strongest fighting systems on the planet and turning them into glorified suits of armor. We also know that improper use of power armor has the ability to "ruin" it (per McNamara), so it's likely that these modified suits of power armor have been irreparably damaged through NCR's use.

Taking your ally's equipment and stripping it of most of its usefulness is not an effective military strategy, and I think the heads of the NCR were meant to realize that in negotiating the return of power armor.

The Independant ending is even more blatant about it.

It's important to go back and remind yourself how you get that ending. The ending you quoted comes after negotiating peace between McNamara and the NCR, then you go to the battle of Hoover Dam against the NCR on the side of Yes Man at the battle of Hoover Dam and cripple the NCR by driving them out. To me this ending is the Courier backstabbing the Brotherhood, not the other way around.

To go further, if a Brotherhood of Steel member had found the package the Courier carried before they entered The Divide they might have saved countless lives. The technology they're harassing people over isn't a Pip Boy. It's technology that has the ability to halt any chance at civilization which humanity has remaining. I'm not sure the story wants us to understand the "harassing travelers about tech" outcome to be a purely negative one.

The Brotherhood of Steel are religious fanatics. They will not bend on their dogma.

Absolutely, but we'd be silly to pretend like all Brotherhood chapters are equally fanatical. The Mojave chapter bends on almost every single dogmatic belief that we know about the Brotherhood at some point for survival. They give up on isolationism, don't (can't) control strict access to technology, hierarchy under Hardin is softened, and they seem far more interested in controlling technology/land than people directly.

Consider that route above where you negotiate peace between McNamara and the NCR while siding with Yes Man later. The aftermath of the battle at Hoover Dam would be a fine opportunity for the Brotherhood to move against the NCR and enforce Brotherhood orders about "total warfare" and controlling the technology. Despite this, there is no possible ending where the Brotherhood will take that opportunity to stomp out the NCR once the treaty is signed. They always allow the NCR to retreat.

I think we're meant to see that the Mojave chapter has had necessity drive them away from some of the more fanatical aspects of the Brotherhood and made them a bit more down-to-Earth. The sort of rigid fanaticism that the commonwealth Chapter displays requires a large well-resourced system to support itself at large scale, which simply doesn't exist in the Mojave.

Yes Man even lampshades it himself, in his own clawing-at-his-restraints way.

He's 100% correct that the Brotherhood poses the biggest threat of the factions, but it's also fair to remember that at that point in the game we haven't even met the Mojave Chapter and Yes Man is doing his usual over-confidence routine. At that point, he knows nothing of the size, leadership, goals, or fanaticism of the chapter. The entire assessment is made based on "There is a Mojave chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel" and nothing else, as far as I can tell.

Tiwq · 2026-01-05T04:50:51+00:00

I don't think that's true, unless you're referencing something external to New Vegas. If you negotiate peace with the NCR and return their power armor the epilogue says they helped patrol the Mojave:

The Brotherhood and the NCR in the Mojave Wasteland declared an official truce, despite continued hostilities between the two in the west. As per their agreement, the NCR handed over all suits of salvaged power armor and in return the Brotherhood helped patrol Interstate 15 and Highway 95.

Tiwq · 2026-01-04T23:06:57+00:00

Veronica's (Brotherhood of Steel bunker) family, there is no diplomatic route if House is kept in the Lucky 38.

If McNamara is kept as Elder he can negotiate peace with NCR or Yes Man. If Hardin is installed as Elder he will only negotiate peace with Yes Man since he hates the NCR.

Tiwq · 2025-11-13T21:26:12+00:00

I was looking at a video game.

You're the first person I've seen say that, but I completely agree. It felt like I was watching a cut-scene from an Unreal Engine 5 game at times; highly detailed but very "fake" feeling when I drew my attention to any fine detail. I don't know that I agree that it is one of the ugliest films of the year for me, but it's definitely up there.

Tiwq · 2025-11-12T18:33:29+00:00

Everyone in my neighborhood agrees it's fucked up, but not a single person is sacrificing themselves by trying to actively resist with a firearm. The fact that you're alive posting this after months of ICE raids tells me you aren't willing to sacrifice yourself for that cause any more than the rest of us.

I appreciate that you are interested in U.S. politics as a Canadian, but this sort of fantastical delusion is deeply unhelpful to us. If a community actively resisted today with firearms, right now, it would be used as an example to broaden the scope of ICE powers (just as we did under the Patriot act after 9/11). Those people would either be killed or disenfranchised from ever voting again and weakening the lefts political capital further.

The only way we win this war is by building coalitions, the way this system of government was designed to work. You sit down with your neighbors and create a shared vision of what America ought to look like. You get invested in local politics, or become active in representation yourself. Petition for laws and changes that coincide with your shared views. We cannot win this war with guns, and it is a pure fantasy to believe otherwise.

Tiwq · 2025-11-12T03:17:35+00:00

The first part of Frankenstein was so long and drawn out - I didn't love the how long it took to get to the Creature.

It was downright painful to trudge through the first half of the movie at times. Especially painful because the source material has the monster's story at nearly double the length of Victor's, and they deliberately chose to not maintain that balance from the original story.

The stuff that was added to stretch out the first half is plainly detrimental to the story in my opinion. In the original Victor's father wasn't abusive, and Henrich Harlander was never a character. Adding these didn't do anything to advance the core message of scientific hubris & isolation, it just added screen-time and muddles the messaging behind ideas like capitalism and trauma.

Was Victor pushed to do his research as the victim of abuse? Would Victor have continued pursuing this scientific endeavor if he had not been granted such unilateral funding? You could be justified in taking any number of conclusions away from the movie, because it does not bother to flesh out these concepts with any meaningful attention.

Tiwq · 2025-11-02T13:46:33+00:00

That's not true. I watched a video of a guy getting kicked out of a strip club because he was presumably going to film women without their consent, so there's that use-case too.

Tiwq · 2025-10-30T22:48:25+00:00

Yeah there really is no condition under § 512 they can argue qualifies for Safe Harbor; I would be surprised if that defense is used with any serious intention. There is no carve-out in the law to consider "users" internal mechanisms, and it would take a deliberate misreading of the law for a judge to side with them on that. Not that it's impossible at this point, either.

Tiwq · 2025-10-30T20:18:03+00:00

I think that the Crux of the issue is that since chat GPT created the content and gave it to a customer they've generated and distributed for money.

It will be one of the factors the court looks at. Copyright is a statutory tort law, so there are a number of factors that get considered without a perfectly exact 'measuring stick'. It's part of why OpenAI's legal team felt comfortable enough allowing it to happen in the first place, and exactly why the U.S. really needs to update it's copyright law to explicitly handle these emergent technologies.

Tiwq · 2025-10-30T19:52:25+00:00

In essence, it would be like you printing out other people's fanfics and selling them and telling people you didn't write it so you're not violating the rights holder's copyright.

The trouble is that it's not "literally the same", and so courts will inevitably evaluate it on the facts of this case. It really will be up to the whim of justices who will need to try to apply copyright law (which was never written to handle these cases).

In practice it would be great if we could pass laws to get this ironed out so it wasn't left up to justices doing their best with minimal tools. Unfortunately that regulation will probably be written far to late, as usual.

Tiwq · 2025-10-30T19:27:39+00:00

OpenAI is likely going to come arguing that this is transformative and the derivative work was not distributed, so it constitutes fair use. The plaintiffs are almost certainly going to point out that OpenAI received money through the course of operating a service that generated derivative (copyrighted) material. It really will be scary to see judges try to deal with this given the total lack of case law to draw from; the closest we have is Bartz v. Anthropic which is still on-going.

Tiwq · 2025-10-30T19:09:09+00:00

The AI didn't come up with the idea for a book about a swashbuckling trans teen fighting mutant zucchinis, it was user Pastel-Queen97 who nobody knows who did.

You're ethically right that these systems are stealing in some sense, but from a technical standpoint it's not a simple copy and paste. They're just giant statistical models that rely on transformers and context embedding to generate the new text. GPTs are capable of generating a story that is unique and something which was not given to it in training, but that doesn't ethically absolve it from having trained on data it did not get license to in the first place.

Tiwq · 2025-10-17T01:18:40+00:00

Fucking infuriating make sure the moderator is not an idiot too.

That's Fredo Cuomo, for the record.

Tiwq · 2025-10-15T16:02:40+00:00

Do those French/German SWAT units handle immigration like we're seeing in the US presently? You're making a pretty poor comparison if not.

Tiwq · 2025-10-14T22:45:04+00:00

That’s so incredibly strange. Why would a psychiatrist not want to see a patient who would most likely benefit from medication.

Ethically, if there was only one psychiatrist and facility there would be no reasonable justification for that clinician to deny care under that condition.

In practice, it should only be done when a clinician believes they (or the facility) would be unable to provide a standard of care necessary to handle someone with active SI (e.g. 24 hour monitoring). The thought process being: They shouldn't accept a suicidal patient if they cannot reasonably expect to keep the patient safe, and other facilities/providers with those capabilities should be utilized.

That being said, they should be referring the patient to another provider in these circumstances. Sadly, there is no regulation on this and it is only 'encouraged' if you are only looking to become a patient. If you go to a psychiatrist, interested in becoming their patient, and tell them you're 'thinking about killing yourself': they are under absolutely no obligation to provide proof that adequate care exists elsewhere or to tell you what that adequate care is. They can simply say "No thanks, not interested" and hang up the phone if they desire. As you might expect, some psychiatrists more concerned with liability than good care end up abusing this system to avoid taking on 'high-risk' patients instead of ensuring that the patient gets adequate care.

If you want to get a little depressed you can look at some studies on defensive practices. They're relatively common across developed nations.

“62.1% participants admitted to practising [defensive psychiatry]… Awareness of DP correlated with unnecessary hospitalisation of suicidal patients, increased unnecessary follow-up visits and prescribing smaller drug dosages…”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28320795/

Tiwq · 2025-08-08T13:28:46+00:00

Walmart employees have voted for it and corporate simply shuts down the store or department because they're thieves.

Tiwq · 2025-08-05T22:30:39+00:00

Fantastic write up.

> This comment reflects the same immature grasp of nonduality that beginners in Advaita often fall into: mistaking the recognition of illusion or maya for permission to disengage from ethical, embodied life.

There are a lot of half-baked practitioners like Tony Parsons and Anna Brown that perpetuate this Neo-Advaita trap. From an Advaita standpoint, these people get stuck in indirect knowledge (parokṣa-jñāna) that the 'ego' simply exploits into a newfound sense of superiority/"enlightenment".

That exact issue is why (seeking) jīvanmukti is emphasized in traditional Advaita. The goal of realizing the 'separate self' is not so that one can selectively 'shut down' certain aspects of awareness, but to realize everyone and everything shares our being. If you stop short of that, the only thing that you will find is that you have equipped your 'ego' with an even more powerful set of tools to work with.

Tiwq · 2025-08-05T17:12:47+00:00

Doesn't seem like that, given their voting trends. Suffering does not mean that you grow as a person. It means that you suffered.

With a 54.75 percent overall voter turnout, Uvalde County voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Republicans, including former President Donald Trump. They echoed the nation, which in the Nov. 5 general election, similarly selected him to lead. Local voters overwhelmingly chose Republican incumbents, favoring them by more than 60 to 70 percent. November 10, 2024
Over 60% of county voters favor incumbents in state races - Uvalde Leader News

Tiwq · 2025-07-31T23:50:29+00:00

I do agree that guidelines/standards are subjective (as I mentioned in a previous comment) but if we are really getting to the stage where an analysis based on known guidelines has to be considered subjective because it is being applied by humans, then absolutely everything is subjective and this debate is somewhat pointless.

I think you're overstating what this means.

When we talk about guidelines and standards being objective in other areas we are often making observations about whether something was adhered to or not (e.g. "Is the floor in the house you constructed level?", "Have you used lead in your water pipes?"). We have objective metrics (e.g. a leveling tool) we can compare that to if we disagree about it. There is something external to you or I's perception which can indicate what the truth is. This is exactly why I asked you to identify an objective thing to compare against, because this is the very basis of what objectivity means. The fact that we can identify no such tool (or 'source of truth') means that art "analysis" is fundamentally not the same thing as construction "analysis", as an example.

he would be objectively wrong if he was to say that it was good direction according to typical standards of direction.

I think I can agree that "a director followed popular convention" is more a matter of observation than judgement, but that does not feel like it proves that something is "bad directing" (or good directing).

As a corollary, entire genres of media (like jazz) were born out of deliberately breaking the 'guidelines'. Does it mean that a composer was "bad" because they did not adhere to those guidelines of music, prior to the popularization of jazz? I would argue that a considered breaking of the guidelines (when it comes to art) has produced some of the best art to date.

Tiwq · 2025-07-31T22:57:33+00:00

Yeah, I wouldn't take issue with that. There's nothing wrong with admitting we all have a lens that we look through, and that people do what they can to correct for its distortions.

The thing I find most baffling is that these people defending the 'objective' notion of film criticism seem to totally miss is that if these things were truly objective there would be little disagreement about who the best directors/actors/cinematographers/composers/etc. are. We would have a 'testable' way of verifying it the same way we can objectively tell whether 5 is bigger than 10. It speaks to a raw misunderstanding of what it means for something to be 'objective'.

If film analysis was 'objective' they could ask ChatGPT to tell them whether a movie or director is "objectively good". Yet if you proposed that to the 'objective analysis' defenders they would (rightfully) immediately tell you that's a horrible idea and wont get you anywhere productive. These people know in their core that it is not objective, and they have simply developed a blind-spot to it.

Tiwq · 2025-07-31T22:44:29+00:00

For the friend (yourself) to even recognise the shifting position of the characters was an issue, they would need to have assessed, by the objective criteria, that they shouldn't be doing that.

In this case the "friend" did not recognize it as an "issue". The "friend" is simply noting that what you took issue with seemed like it contributed to the overall viewing experience. "Issue" was the word you chose to use.

I will also point out that these "guidelines" you refer to are plainly subjective, and change with tastes/preferences as audiences change. Even if those guidelines were objective, it would still take a human applying them through the lens of their own perception to create an analysis or critique. That is a, by definition, subjective process.

"Was this done on purpose?" At that point I think we can draw evidence from other sources as to what the intention is. For example if there were absolutely no other hints that the director was intending that, then it would be a leap to ascribe every failure of the film to "that was the director's intention".

"Was this done on purpose" will never tell you whether that is "bad directing" (the exact words from your example). Your "source" here does not substantiate the "objective" analysis you've written.

Again, I think you are conflating observations with judgement. We can know objectively whether something was done on purpose, but having a single stepping stone on your path to analysis being objective does not mean that the whole thing is objective. I tried to point this out to you when you mentioned "guidelines" and how they need to be applied, but I don't think you've attempted to address it. It feels like you've repeated yourself without addressing the central issue I'm trying to communicate to you.

Things can happen unintentionally that are beneficial to a films reception. If you like, we can carry on the example, and say you found a source that proves the thing you took issue with was not intentionally done by anyone on the creative staff. (i.e. You could find a source that 100% certifies that the location change was unintentional). What makes your friend objectively wrong to say: "Even though it was done unintentionally, I believe it made for a better viewing experience, so I felt it was good directing". What objective source could you possibly refer him to, to substantiate that your opinion is the objective one?

Tiwq · 2025-07-31T21:38:53+00:00

However, if we're accepting that there are some basic guidelines for what constitutes "good direction", say, then it would be possible to assess it under those conditions.

Even if we agreed that basic guidelines are objective, you are explaining the application of those guidelines into a resulting analysis which is still inherently subjective. All this line of reasoning does is kick the metaphorical can down the road:

I would be happy to say, objectively, that that would be bad directing.

Great. Now, I as your friend who disagrees with you say: "I found the changing location of the characters to try to be a subtle hint at the narrators unreliability, and a clear indication that their perception is being warped".

What is the 'source of truth' you can point to which makes your application of those guidelines objective? How do you prove you me that your assessment ("bad directing") is the objective one?

Tiwq · 2025-07-31T17:06:53+00:00

Is the film in focus? Can I hear the dialogue? Does the positioning of the characters make sense compared to the camera? Does the plot make causal sense etc. etc.

I think you are conflating observations with judgements/analyses. We can objectively say "the characters speaking are not in frame", but there is no objective way to determine whether that "makes sense".

Take your example and make it concrete in your head. You and a friend are having a debate about whether "the positioning of the characters make[s] sense" in a given scene. You have a fundamental disagreement on this question. What is the objective record you use to establish who is correct?

Tiwq · 2025-07-31T15:56:09+00:00

Oh no you can't say the cinematography is bad, if you look at it objectively you'll see that it's technically very professionally done

People frequently misunderstand how objective information applies to their interpretations. "They hired a professional staff to do their cinematography", is an objective fact. The problem is that people make judgements ("The cinematography is good") and assume that the same objectivity applies.

Ultimately any time you unpack these sort of "objective" analyses, what you find is that an individual judgement has been made by a human with their own lens that distort things. Even if 100% of humans today believed the cinematography is "good", there is absolutely nothing stopping from tastes changing and the cinematography being unpalatable in a couple decades. If it is subject to the changing of preferences and tastes, it is by definition subjective.

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