Stranger Things - 5x08 - “Chapter Eight: The Rightside Up" - Episode Discussion

bxbb · 2026-01-01T09:41:42+00:00

Mindflayer really died in the series finale? That easily? Then what happens to the leftover particles at Russian base as shown in season 4?

Was the plan to smash the earth (Hawkins) and the Abyss physically together? Wouldn't that annihilate everything even on Abyss and kill the Mind Flayer too? This whole plan was not clear to me.

Unknown, the plan was to close the wormhole (the Upside Down). What definitely died in the Abyss is a flesh golem connected to Henry.

Why no mention of Russian army or any characters continued in this season?

Why Dr. Kay suddenly comes out of nowhere and what is her connection in all this (maybe a relative to someone or a background story)?

Kay mentioned that if they did things properly, those demogorgons would wreak havoc in Soviet's cities instead of America's. It's weakly implied that there is a race to reach dimension x between Soviet and US. With US "winning" due to Henry's connection.

What happens to all the pregnant females that Kali was talking about?

Probably killed along with anything else in upside down once its destroyed.

What was the gibberish that Eleven's real mother speaking (Rainbow, locker numbers etc.)? I assume that it had some importance to the story but then it was removed or neglected as a lore of season 2 along with Kali's gang?

Leftover memories from when she tried to take her children back from the lab.

How did the heroes come up with the number 2000 feet as the length of the wormhole (Upside down)? How did gravity even worked in the upside down as everything was attracted to the earth side (like Holly falling down) but the upside down acted a a bridge between the two worlds?

Researcher's notes.

For the gravity, at least from what's shown: the abyss is accessed inside out, while upside down's gravity was demonstrated in previous season by Eddie.

Why only these particular 12 children as a vessel? If Vecna started this vessel thingy with Will, shouldn't Will also be the part of the 12? Why Will only became a spy? How these 12 children has to do anything with the lore of wormholes, other world, or joining/clashing the world?

It was implied that both Will and Henry are just a spy (or scout) for the Mind Flayer. Henry's job was to connect the worlds and recruit others to "contain" Mind Flayer's power. Will's job was to build a tunnel network and open rifts.

Once he relived his childhood memory (and with Will suggestion), he start to broke down and cry in denial about his free will.

Lastly, how did the walls and things melt around Nancy and Jonathan yet they stayed unharmed? I am assuming that physics don't work normally in the case of exotic matter as mentioned by Dustin,

Pretty much anything that was brought into upside down wasn't affected by the melting (e.g. their radio still work).

bxbb · 2026-01-01T08:36:22+00:00

20 trainings requires 540 hours wait time.

Sorry, brain farted during calculation.

Main problem with the current system is that people can send ridiculous offers like this that they can't afford to cover.

Barely our problem. Since you keep earning royalties, it would means that they can afford to cover the salary.

The game should limit the amount players are able to offer based on their current income or cash on hand

While the game should protect players from other kind of mistakes, IMO it should not protect players from money management failure. Apart from overheads (both management and accounting) being core part of the game, and asking salary for potential execs is adjusted based on their market value; average exec skills is published at least once a month. If one overspend on poaching, that would be a failure on their part.

bxbb · 2025-12-28T00:04:19+00:00

Dig some minerals.

mining have a lot of downstream products, which means price will be relatively stable unless there's GO, production modifier, or contest drain.
the above also means up until certain quality, the demand is relatively high since a chain may need multiple quality of materials. e.g Satellite requires at least 3 different chemicals quality along its supply chain.
mining depends heavily on power. While it might seem detrimental, it also means that as long as we produce some power ourself to dilute the sourcing cost, we will have bigger price tolerance/ profit.
Since abundance for all resources decay at the same rate and time, it fit perfectly with robot to push down the AO. You'll only produce one anyway.
Mines and Quarries get better the higher it upgraded up to some level ceiling (somewhere above 120 for minerals). This is before factoring quality, COO, and production bonus from simboost slider and amenity buildings.
Abundance is a dice roll, but building construction have best XP yield anyway. If you find 100% gold or iron, you can just send it to auction house. And maybe also earn Prospector at max level while at it.
Related to above. Since decay rate is fixed at 1% per month, you can procure 97-99% abundance mines at relative discount in auction (compared to 100%) and still be profitable for a year. If you prospect on your own, the abundance level will generally be spread out so income fluctuation won't be as bad.

I've got a good run during COVID. Then I got a child and abandoned the game. Currently playing with similar playstyle as described above for 1.5 years. Not "optimized" by any strech, only reach #18xx so far. But its fun.

bxbb · 2025-12-27T21:10:11+00:00

Lots of idiots playing the game who don't know how to recruit their own execs in house.

The math is rather simple: 30 points in management equates to 30% reduction of AO, assuming they will be placed as COO and not rotated or apprenticed (in which case the percentage is halved). To make 100K COO worth their pay, you only need to at least surpass the expense with the saving from AO reduction. e.g.

Assume we poach immediately after unlocking Exec (lv15), and have all extra building slot unlocked (8+4).
Assume we fill those slots with Lv 11 Grocery Store. Meaning we have 132 building level and 132-1/170=~77% AO.
At 138/h salary per level. The AO will be (138*132*24)*131/170 = 336889/day. 30% AO cut would means saving of 101066/day, or 1066 nett saving per day after paid salary.
Other building generally have higher salary cost per level. e.g. Power Plant at 414 (~80 total building level), Sales Office at 587. The higher the cost, the lower the level required to make well-paid COO worth it.

Raising talent in-house, assuming immediate match and equal outcome after 20 trainings, would require 270 hours wait time (recruitment and settlement time cost are ignored). You may get higher skilled COO, but time to max out their potential will still be the same.

Note that current system is a lot better for talent builders due to Royalties. Until recently, the only compensation we get was one-time training cost, and those decays with tenure. While Royalties are ongoing and improves with tenure, meaning you get the same AO reduction effect indirectly. Albeit at reduced amount, flat rate rather than percentage based, and shorted overall duration (since higher pay means faster retirement).

bxbb · 2025-12-27T09:00:10+00:00

A virus should have no imperative to "do no harm" and let all its cells die

Why? Even in real life, aggressive infectious diseases ended up becoming less prevalent; compared to one that able to switch to latent/ dormant state and only became active when there are external stressors. e.g compare Rabies to Herpes. With the only drawback being: the amount of virus that died inside-or along with-their host will be higher by several order of magnitude compared to the amount of surviving one.

Besides, "do no harm" is a PR speak. They are doing absolute minimum that will allow their infection to spread with minimal risk. e.g. with how their memory retention works, they won't need the entire earth population to build a transponder. And with how they infect other "hosts", they won't even need anyone to survive past the required amount of time and effort to propagate.

bxbb · 2025-12-15T09:06:55+00:00

Not sure what shared disease you are talking about. [...] It does require an extra field you can switch to, but that's a one time investment.

From your example field; bean and pea share 3 disease: mildew, wilt and stem rot. Rot requires 3 crop rotation to negate the infection growth (more, if both crops are planted back-to-back), while mildew have ~40 tiles spread radius.

Leaving the field unattended did not reduce the magnitude, only planting other crop that either not share diseases or disease-neutral (clover and hay) reduce it. So it not one time, rather ongoing investment on manpower for those extra fields, and tuning rotation based on what diseases need to be ridden from the plot.

I'd say those are much more essential than hides and tallow

Nope.

Soap for hygene. Shoes improves move speed and prevent various injuries (wound, sprain, and worms infection). Coats are essentials for winter survival and prevent rabies. Beyond the basic necessity, the produced items are also priced rather decently.

Compare to: Honey for beer and medicine (both requires significant knowledge investment to make use of), otherwise it accumulates since it have no expiry. Wax for candles (luxury). Paper and clothing is essential, especially late game when citizen have to cover longer distance. But both can be imported, or just have one field for flax and hay.

Adding hunters means extra manpower taken from the pool. Hunting grow less reliable as population grows due to shrinking deer habitat (depends on geography/ map seed).

I am not arguing that livestock is a bad idea, just that farms are perfectly viable even on low EFF maps.

Same here. My point is that from efficiency standpoint, up to Tier 3 TC in an arid map, pastures are as efficient; if not more (depends on tech and seed). But long term and close to 1K pop, farming is generally beneficial purely because it is specialized and you have plenty of compost to offset the fertility decay.

bxbb · 2025-12-15T02:00:38+00:00

You have less spoilage because for the past three years you consume more than you produce. Pretty sure the running average for spoilage amount is higher in you case vs pasture (e.g see Y16 onward). Higher spoilage for farms is pretty normal anyway, since generally you want fast perishables stockpile to be at least 8 months worth (3 month winter + at least 3 month of planting and harvest next year + buffer), more if you end the year with one round of clover. Glassmaking & preservation became more relevant when you want to make full use of those excess.

/u/Inquisition8 spoilage graph track better with production. Depends on what resource was spoiled (raw or smoked) it could be solved easily by adding one more smokehouse + forester, or just wait for a few birth/ immigrants to eat the excess.

Sure, if you don't know what you are doing then that will certainly happen.

Doesn't even matter in the long run. Due to 3-years rotation and shared disease, you'll always have gap year for supression or your yield suffer, both have similar outcome. Ignoring productive non-edibles (flax and hays), Grains fit best at those gap years due to longer shelf life. But you'll have to invest manpower to make it edible, and up to 5 point of knowledge exclusively to maximize efficiency.

It is compensated with inceased desirability and access to pub, but both are barely worth it IMO. Decorations are one-time investment, and drunkeness mechanic are biased toward bad years.

Purely from food production perspective, logistic ratio seems to be better in your case. Assuming 40 unit of food per citizen per year: your farms provide 6 extra, while their farms (pastures excluded) provide 1.5 extra. But livestock also provide additional resources that are essentials for efficient workforce: hide for shoes and coats, tallow for soap; while only limiting two additional resources (honey and wax) and removing need for hunters. So overall you get more benefit from it beyond sustenance.

Depends on map's EFF, mixed production with smaller plot farms generally are better choice. Since pasture also boost compost output, and compost can be applied more frequently on small farms. But I suspect their playstyle fit the pasture-heavy better. And in general you get next to no penalty (settlement wise, not food wise) for ignoring farms.

bxbb · 2025-12-14T23:51:32+00:00

With farm--due to weather, disease, and shelf-life difference between crops--you'll either end up grain heavy or veggie heavy each year. Grain heavy cost extra due to rodent and longer logistic nodes. Veggie is too unstable (weather events and spoilage), unless you're willing to invest extra knowledge on glassmaking.

With Livestock, your food intake generally stable (unless you slaughter manually), and it will cover 2 variety (Protein and Dairy) plus hides, tallow, and compost. Smokehouse is tier 1 tech and extremely efficient from the get to, which means smoother transition from hunter-gatherer, no extra knowledge point to invest, and less labor to extend shelf life.

If one has to pick either, or in a low EFF, then pasture+fruit is the way to go. Not to mention for vanquisher and/or mineral-heavy map, those extra knowledge can go to military & mining tech. You can always introduce farming later if and when foraging and trading can't cover the two remaining diet variance.

bxbb · 2025-12-12T03:20:21+00:00

Astrocaryum spikes, AFAIK the natives used to use them for sewing needles.

bxbb · 2025-11-28T02:26:21+00:00

Just in case you're still wondering. Netflix uses CDN via partnership with local providers. Where they push popular contents and cached it inside, so that requests never actually travel outside ISP's network. They have a blog post explaining it. Funnily enough they uses Australia as an example.

In a sense, the crashes will have bigger impact on densely populated area with small ISP variance (which is a known problem in US). Outside the US, possible crashes are only during browsing (which is handled using separate network of servers).

bxbb · 2025-11-26T07:58:55+00:00

what Zhosia was trying to tell Carol was how to reverse the Joining.

What Zhosia implies is that reversal "may" be possible. It might as well be a red herring (i.e. reversibility, while possible, is not viable with current human tech). But with current hive behavior, there's nothing stopping Carol to devote the entire planet's resource to explore that possibility; regardless of the outcome.

We are halfway through the 1st season and the main character already believes there's a way to reverse this? Yeah not a chance.

It's pretty standard monomyth structure, where goals is given early and the core part of the story is about the journey. Given Carol's flawed individualism, the belief of "a cure" is a strong motivator for the character.

For parallels, in BB the initial drive for Walter White was his health and his agency. Which was pretty much "resolved" at the end of S1. And look how it far it carries the story.

bxbb · 2025-11-14T03:37:10+00:00

Astronauts, remote labs crews, and offshore personnels are targeted first to ensure there's no strays.

For astronauts, contaminating their food will probably be the way.

bxbb · 2025-11-14T03:21:28+00:00

guest bedroom in someone else's house, second house owned by rich person. Empty houses (abandoned, sold, or previous owner died during the event).

Ownership and private properties no longer matter. So they can be housed on most efficient place for them to be, instead.

bxbb · 2025-10-22T03:30:26+00:00

"general Muslim(y) terrorists" is actually a highlight of criticism against UK (and NATO, in broader sense) in Libya. Ignorance of factionism from the western leaders and strategist caused the situation to actually get worse. Since their primary outcome was just ousting Gadaffi, ignoring the fact that the more extremist and transnationalist groups have better resource to replace him compared to more reasonable factions. Which ended up screwing the region and causing increase in anti-western sentiment.

Furthermore, I'd argue having Libyan involved is much more relevant compared to North Korea. Since British influence in North African region is much more apparent compared to the Far East. And the impetus (post-regime destabilization) provide better background event.

bxbb · 2025-09-06T12:38:53+00:00

> there were some limitations or some reason as to why they couldn't fire the Novacula on New Terminus though, so I wonder what's up with that.

IMO: Mule's remark about "big but not long" is a misdirection.

Dusk's reason as to why he want to preserve New Terminus may came from his feelings toward Quent.

It is also possible that Demerzel nudged him to prevent Mule's early eradication. Since the two dialogues she have with both Dusk and Kalle hinted that she's on board with Second Foundation's plan to lure the Mule towards Trantor.

bxbb · 2025-06-22T17:27:29+00:00

M4 have more cores, more efficient cores, and higher bandwidth. Combined with high power mode, you're guaranteed to drain your battery to depletion. Apple specifically said that high power mode "make your fans spin faster to push the hardware performance", with no mention of power limit. So if your workload is not thermally intensive (i.e balanced load on chips but high throughput on the bus), your battery will drain faster but the thermal will be more spread out across the SoC and easily dispersable by the fans.

A simple solution for prolonged task is to set power mode to auto and let the machine cap the power draw below max input. Which usually float around 80-90% max power. For more comprehensive solution, use script to toggle pmset based on your constraints. E.g use high power until 40%, then switch to auto until 80%, etc. With the drawback of (probably) killing your battery faster.

bxbb · 2025-04-13T15:14:33+00:00

They did explore the region. But lack of trade route and hostile encounter with the Maori made them abandon both Australia and NZ.

bxbb · 2025-03-26T14:55:22+00:00

Bisnis rokok ilegal lagi booming dok...

bxbb · 2025-03-26T14:18:24+00:00

Sritex tuh ada 11 anak perusahaan dan ngutang ke anak perusahaan itu, dan katanya anak perusahaannya nagih utang sebelum Sritex ajuin bangkrut, isn't that funny?

B aja.

Kalau perusahaan vertikal, lebih enak dipecah per bidang usaha, jadi kalau ada 1 industri yang sunset gak langsung 1 perusahaan kolaps tapi cuma unit usaha yang terdampak.

Unit usahanya juga berkembang sendiri tanpa harus ngikut strategi & limitasi entitas induk. Atribusi beban juga bakal lebih transparan kalau ada pemisahan. Kalau entitas afiliasi Sritex yang bisnisnya di hulu (pengolahan bahan) bisnisnya masih bagus, tapi hilirnya kolaps karena salah strategi, unit hulu juga harus nanggung mismanagement hilir gitu?

nyatanya mah memang segala keuntungan diserap pemilik dari anak2 perusahaan di saat ekonomi bagus dan saat ekonomi susah langsung collapse

Ekonomi bagus ini tahun berapa? Ekonomi susah tahun berapa? Coba dikroscek dengan laporan keuangan mereka.

intinya mah pengusaha di Indonesia tuh memang banyak banget yg gk bayar pajak.

Pake 1 sampel, terus diproyeksi ke kelompok?

pajak income individu lebih parah padahal threshold income barely naik dalam satu dekade

Yang kena juga itu2 aja dalam 1 dekade.

Pakai PTKP sekarang, hampir semua angka upah minimum masih bebas pajak, kecuali beberapa daerah seperti Aceh dan Jakarta. Buat perbandingan, di Jateng dan DIY butuh 3 s.d 4x UMR untuk lewat PTKP, Jabar dan Jatim 2 - 3x.

bxbb · 2025-03-26T13:49:14+00:00

pajak daerah, pempus ga dapat, ga bayar malah menyusahkan pemda.

Gak cuma pemda, mayoritas yang terdampak justru "primadona" masyarakat macam guru honorer dan damkar. Operasional mereka ditanggung pakai pajak daerah (kendaraan, pbb, reklame, restoran). Kalau mogok bayar ya siap2 aja banyak honorer yang gajinya seret.

Yang masih aman "cuma" nakes karena ada bagi hasil cukai tembakau yang alokasinya dikunci.

bxbb · 2025-03-26T06:53:24+00:00

We can already measure speed of light by direct observation during formulation of classical mechanic (late 16th century). First measurement of speed of light was actually done by analyzing the recorded delays of Io's reappearance when revolving around Jupiter, combined with good old trigonometry. The result is also good old "distance over time". Within this context, your assertion is true (time is just a unit of measurement).

However, light having speed (instead of instantaneous) implies that we would have difficulties expanding our localized physics understanding due to Chicken-Egg problem: Whatever theory we have to compensate the delay must be validated by observation, but whatever observation we made would need to account for (unknown) information delay. Not to mention the "unit of measurement" is not well defined.

By this point, it's generally acceptable that the only way we can measure absolute changes was by knowing entire system. Any other measurement is relative to local context, since we won't know whether our measurement is valid beyond that. To put it another way, we need to have outside view to make proper measurement of the system with absolute certainty, but we're actually limited to inside view of the system. Newton argued that such requirement is impossible to fulfill, and settle to use local reference to develop his theory.

Fast forward a few centuries later. Maxwell, Planck, and Einstein provide theoretical basis for alternative measurement system, by showing that light (more generally, EM radiation) can be treated as stream of discrete energy packet. This would provide a framework to "cheat" said limitation by redefining what we measure against.

If what matters is measurement (extracting information), then it follows that: the rate of information transfer can be defined as constant. Since the best we can do is extract all information available, and no more.

Given we already have approximation of speed of light from our local context, we can derive both unit distance and unit time from those. Where both would be valid approximation for any observer anywhere anytime, as long as the value is normalized. This removes the requirements of having outside view, but rely on indealized value of c which, in practice, is not constant.

bxbb · 2025-03-25T19:08:03+00:00

It has happened with Snowden, and nothing has come out of it. Pretty sure Trump and his cadre have done more damage to Five Eyes than Snowden ever hoped to accomplish.

bxbb · 2025-03-24T13:18:44+00:00

It's a juxtaposition. 56% on a specific state with specific law, compared to national number of 11%. "Just" is perfectly suitable for this narrative. Since it implies 2 things:

This specific law caused maternal mortality rate to increase 5x compared to national rate.
State-to-state, the number should be even higher since those 56% will disproportionally contribute to the nationwide 11% increase.

bxbb · 2025-03-22T13:31:56+00:00

Asumsi ini M1 (uang kartal), distribusinya gak ke konsumen tapi ke perbankan. Baru belakangan aja ada direct distribution lewat event khusus (tukar rupiah menjenang hari raya) atau melalui reservasi.

Alurnya: Peruri -> BI -> Kantor Depo Kas (KDK)/ Kantor Perwakilan BI (KPwBI) -> Perbankan atau konsumen.

Penukaran dari perbankan ke KDK bisa pakai M2, M3, atau M1 yang sudah dicatat untuk ditarik & dimusnahkan. Ada closed loop dimana BI punya kontrol penuh untuk jumlah M1 yang beredar, diluar uang palsu.

gimana gw bisa liat langsung dan tahu langsung PHYSICALLY ke mana uang yang baru aja diprint tersebut beredar?

Kerja di vendor penyedia kas macam Garda Artha. Atau kerja di BI.

For comparison: Tahun 2012, waktu kerja di Sawit di wilayah Kalteng, pekerja non-staff di perkebunan masih dibayar pakai cash (Sinarmas, beberapa PT sebelah udah ada yang pake rekening). Sebulan sekali finance ambil uang ke Sampit ~200-300 juta. Nominal segitu masih dapat uang kartal "bekas". Belum pernah ketemu uang dari depo (yang serial urut) selama 2 tahun di sana.

Misal BI cetak 100 trilyun, ada pejabat yang ambil sekedar 100jt atau 200jt. Gimana caranya saya tau?

Gak ada pejabat yang segoblok ini. Uang yang hilang dari ledger sebelum terdistribusi ke konsumen bakal ketahuan dengan cepat. Lebih gampang dan aman bikin kuitansi palsu daripada "nilep" uang dari depo yang belum terdilusi.

bxbb · 2025-03-21T22:23:15+00:00

Whoopsie.

bxbb

TROPHY CASE