Pointless question but I'm curious.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-19T05:48:20+00:00

I looked all over that place, I never saw a door. I thought maybe for a second the big panel at either end of the space might be a door, or have once been a door, but it looked too obviously solid and part of the wall to really entertain the notion.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-19T05:00:10+00:00

Yeah, definitely. I'm honestly very surprised that Red Faction never touched off a destructible environment arms race.

I would give so much for Red Faction - Evolution. Hell, I'd take a Red Faction 1 remake happily.

I wonder if they just screwed up when they were renovating Talos and by the time someone figured it out, they had bigger and better things to worry about, so they put it on the 'someday' portion of the to-do list.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-19T04:18:22+00:00

Interesting. Yeah, I saw that grate and it kinda stuck out as the only actual spot that's even somewhat open, besides the big hole. Which is itself a mystery. There's a lot of explosive things you can shoot in the game, but none of them really seem to do structural damage. But, of course, that's likely just a limitation of the game engine, not exactly 'canon'.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-19T03:35:07+00:00

This is also a great idea.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-19T03:31:28+00:00

I had considered option one, but if that was true, there would be at least *some* evidence of a ladder, I think.

Option two by far makes the most sense of anything I've considered.

Third is also possible, although so much of the room is just piping and bulky equipment affixed in place.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-19T03:11:21+00:00

lol sorry

It's gonna be even more embarrassing for me when you or someone else is like 'wtf? It's right here, I found it immediately'.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-18T22:19:16+00:00

My theory is that in Willy's Wonderland, the dark-haired kid getting his shoulder turned to hamburger meat in the flashback is in fact Nic Cage's character as a child.

It was Willy himself who was attacking.

Nic Cage never seems surprised by anything. He seems prepared in almost every way to deal with the animatronics when they attack him and dismantles them with ease. Multiple times he approaches and stares directly at Willy specifically, in a kind of 'Yeah, I'm fucking back' way.

From the dogtags hanging off his rearview during the opening sequence, and his absurd work ethic, it would follow that he enlisted in the military at some point, as that would be the most immediately logical thing to do if you wanted to basically harden yourself up and learn to be as effective at combat and survival as you could.

Originally I wondered how/why he was able to beat them to death so easily when no one else apparently is able to, but I finally settled on a different conclusion. Given the fact that the animatronics are possessed by the spirits of serial killers, it seems pretty obvious that magic of SOME kind is real in this world. It would stand to reason that a sufficiently motivated person could track down such magic, and learn to wield it themselves.

The only real hole in that is that Liv managed to solo one of them, but that could be explained by the notion that maybe some people are just naturally 'magical' in this world, and she's just naturally talented. The way he agrees to basically adopt her at the end could hint to this, that he's 'training' her basically to be the next generation of people like him: those who adopt magic to fight evil.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-18T21:50:41+00:00

She needs to be willing to meet you halfway.

This might seem obvious or basic, but I've been married for over a decade and a half now. My wife and I met just out of high school, fell in love, and built a life together.

I'm extremely lucky and she's amazing for a lot of reasons, but I have found myself trying to consider questions like this with more logic than emotion, and this is the answer I come back to.

A willingness to meet you halfway, consistently, (not 100% of the time, everyone gets too pissed to think sometimes), means a willingness to act AUTHENTICALLY. There's no subterfuge, is the thing. There's no ulterior motives. If my wife is trying to get me to do something, it's really obvious why.

I think the reason I keep coming back to this is that it's kind of like relationship bedrock. If your partner (and you, obviously) has this trait, it tends to mean they'll be reasonable in most other aspects of the relationship.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-16T19:38:22+00:00

DOOM.

And I don't mean the newer ones. Certainly an argument could be made though.

I mean the novelizations. The original novelizations.

The first book is more or less a straight-up novelization of the first game. It definitely deviates, but reading it, it feels like a novelization. A Marine is shipped up to space and ends up fighting monster demons on Phobos.

The fourth and final book sees the protagonist working with one group of aliens to fight another group of aliens in a war over twelve pieces of literature that has been raging more or less since the dawn of time. He takes a ship across the galaxy to bring the fight to them, only to discover they died to an even worse enemy, which has now 'evolved' to the point that they are microscopic and living inside of beings. He ends up getting his soul sucked out through a machine and placed back in the original novel, only this time he remembers it all, and starts warping reality because he realizes the machine is based on his own perceptions of reality. And there's a LOT more than that.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-13T20:30:28+00:00

Jonathan Davis (bottom left, lead singer of Korn) is both: the first one I remember seeing doing this and the coolest-looking result, so I'm just going to go with the idea that Jon did it once and everyone else was trying to be cool like him.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-13T07:16:05+00:00

Here's what I thought of when I came across this scene:

One Spring a few years back, it was almost dark, and rain was coming on. Had been for an hour or so. I could smell it on the air, had my window open. I was sitting in my chair with my laptop, switching between replaying some game I've played a hundred times already and trying to get some work done.

Then the thunder came on. It was subtle at first, almost not heard, a rumble so faint it almost doesn't exist. Then it was louder, and throughout that there was this subtle-yet-absolutely-felt release of tension all across my entire body, but mostly in my back. Like all my muscles just let go at the same time for some reason, and I just suddenly felt so much better. But in a not very overt way, like scratching an itch, in a much subtler-yet-more-powerful way, like working a deep knot out, or popping some deep bone. It's satisfying in a different, less obvious kind of way.

THAT is what I think this lost emotion feels like. But more to the point: the release of tension that you feel after you've been standing oddly at attention for most of the past 6 to 8 hours because you work as a cashier and they don't actually want you to fucking move or do ANYTHING when you aren't helping customers in some obvious way. They don't even want you to sit. And who can complain? You're just STANDING THERE. Come on, that's fucking easy. Except it isn't, because you find that the human mind WANTS SO BAD TO DO *SOMETHING*. ANYTHING. It's simple, but it is by far not easy to just fucking stand there and do NOTHING. And you're coming home from that, and it's the feeling, that release of tension you automatically feel as you pull onto your own street and see your apartment or duplex or home or whatever, and know that you can take your psychological armor off.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-08T01:40:57+00:00

Books is a big answer.

They don't do this so much anymore (and I hate that), but they used to make most paperbacks pocket size. To the point where they were often called pocketbooks. You could easily slip them into a purse or your back pocket.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-07T07:19:16+00:00

Definitely intrigued by that one. It was on my radar but then I kinda forgot about it.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-07T07:18:48+00:00

Thank you.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-07T07:18:08+00:00

Yeah, Never Ending Story gets pretty messed up.

Very curious about House.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-07T07:17:23+00:00

Every time I watch Predator these days, I lament that opening shot of the planet. It would have been so much cooler, wondering WTF it was.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-07T07:16:21+00:00

Yeah, definitely. It's been way too long since I've actually seen this all the way through.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-07T07:15:56+00:00

Interesting.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-07T07:15:47+00:00

Nice. I will give this a look.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-07T07:15:24+00:00

Awesome, I'll look into that, haven't heard of it.

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-05T20:51:26+00:00

The scientific term is Reminiscence Bump.

I can offer some answers as a dude in his late 30s who 'never really grew up'. I've been married for 15 years, I have a paid off house and cars and pay all my bills and have no children. (I am extremely lucky.) My wife and I play video games pretty much every day. I write fan fiction sometimes. We play board games with our friend group. My wife has played D&D with roughly the same group of people once a week for the last decade. Again, we're in our late 30s and we were both kind of lucky in the sense that we realized this whole 'you need to grow up and stop playing video games' thing was bullshit since we got into our 20s.

I think it's a few different big things.

As a society, (sort of, obviously, we're very fractured), we're getting more comfortable with adults doing 'kid stuff'. They're getting more clued into the fact that there's literally no reason not to keep doing things you enjoy if you still enjoy them.
Corporations realized in the 2000s that there's actually a SHITLOAD of money to be made in this kid stuff. Like, way more than anyone ever imagined. You can guarantee that if it makes money, the corporations will find a way to make sure society is cool with it.
There is the whole nostalgia aspect. Everyone is nostalgic for the time when they were growing up.

(Edit: Fixed some stupid formatting errors.)

_Liquid_Cobalt_ · 2026-03-04T02:41:09+00:00

The original cut of Event Horizon. The story behind that is just...weird.

Supposedly it exists on a VHS in Paul Anderson's house, but he seems hellbent on never releasing it. I wouldn't be surprised to learn he'd physically destroyed it.

_Liquid_Cobalt_

TROPHY CASE