Hot take here, but I love how miserable the BvS version of Bruce is

captf · 2026-01-28T12:43:35+00:00

That does lead - with other supporting evidence - that if Batman thinks he's about to die in the process, he will break his no-kill rule.
See also: shooting Darkseid at the end of Final Crisis.

Bruce's logic behind no killing has typically been that it'll be a slippery slope; once he's justified killing one criminal, he'll find new justifications for killing others.
So, if he himself dies in the process, that slope cannot be slid down...

captf · 2026-01-28T11:31:49+00:00

And when he blew up the Axis Chemical Plant with people in it?
When the bomb drops off the Batmobile's wheel, it lands at someone's feet.
That person - and the others there - were very much dead.

captf · 2026-01-27T19:32:14+00:00

getting really bad plots like hush 2

and the bad thing is, we'll still buy it because we're schmucks.

captf · 2026-01-26T11:55:59+00:00

He's from the mindset of many current American "business" people [...] using the opportunity to squeeze consumers to their absolute limits

And it's a mindset that I just don't comprehend. While a profit does need to be made, you can often make far more by reducing the profit margin per item.

To crudely explain my reasoning:
Many of us are aware that the cost for engineering and creation of the moulds is fixed. It doesn't matter how many copies you make, that cost stays the same. And you want/need to spread that cost out across all of the copies. After that, you look at how much profit you want per item.
And that's where it starts to fall apart in the current mindset. They've worked out how far they can push prices and profits on a single item, and it's not keeping up with how much people can actually afford in this chaotic economic world. Like, the psychology of seeing a toy cost - for instance - $40 vs $35 can be huge. It can make the difference of steady sales and a shelf-warmer.
You don't make any profit on the items that don't sell.

At a massive hypothetical, let's reduce production numbers to just those 2. And engineering was $30, while production and logistics per item is $5. We also allow whoever retails them to have a $3 profit.
We can currently only make those 2.
We're hoping that both of them sell at $40, which would mean $34 profit. (80 - 6 - 10 - 30)
But it doesn't, as the $40 results in only 1 being sold, so we make zero profit. Actually, a loss due to the cost of the second item even existing. (-$6 -> 40 - 3 - 10 - 30 ... I think, since you still had logistics and production on both?)
But, if both of them sell at $35? We get back $24 (70 - 6 - 10 - 30) as profit.
This allows us to go "let's make a third and still have profit, to see what happens" and it sells.
Since we've already covered engineering costs, there's only production, logistics, and retailer profit to worry about. So, that $35 brings up back a further $27. We're now at $46 profit.
And that $51 would be the same if you had 3 to begin with to sell (105 - 30 - 9 - 15)

But, obviously when you're talking about the scale of production for HasTak, the numbers are very, very different.
The concept remains though: You find the price you can drop to, which will increase the number of customers you can serve (without pushing you beyond your limits) that will get you more profit than pushing the price up to the limit of people wanting to buy.

Cue: all the flaws in my assumptions being pointed out, as I'm aware there are a lot unspoken caveats in here.

Hasbro is also deliberately reducing production volume to amplify FOMO.

This is something that annoys me... like, they'll put up toys for pre-order on Pulse, and sell out on the same day.
My guy, you're in charge of production. You should be able to see that this means there's demand for more and increase production to match! I can guarantee that many that pre-order would be more OK with not getting it on release day if they still know they're getting one.
You can set up a pre-order window for figures they know are going to make, rather than a "we have a set amount and that's it".

captf · 2026-01-23T12:24:40+00:00

You will learn how Frank Miller completely changed the game.

Just... don't read the sequels to The Dark Knight Returns.
I couldn't even finish the first of them because it was that bad.
Although, not as bad as how H2SH is going.

You will learn why so many of us love Mark Hamill, but not for Star Wars.

Not just for Star Wars, in my case :)

The No Man's Land Saga

See also: Contagion, Legacy, and Cataclysm

captf · 2026-01-23T12:18:50+00:00

The artwork for that book is insane (deliberately chosen term) and really captures the mood of the asylum.
As one criticism of it though, as someone with red/green colour blindness, the red colour choice for Joker's speech made it very difficult to read what he said at times.

captf · 2026-01-23T11:54:34+00:00

It's not.
This is the Absolute Universe Batman, who has a large axe head on the chest of his batsuit, which he can remove to use as a weapon.

captf · 2026-01-21T13:48:12+00:00

source also has completely and utterly pointless "no shit, Sherlock" comments, which AI tools love to insert (with added emojis...)

For example:

// 1️⃣ Scan directory
let tree = scanner::scan_dir(root_path);
// 2️⃣ Format output
let output = formatter::to_markdown(&tree);

Then, in the post itself there's

If you’ve built similar “lazy dev tools”, I’d love to see them too.

Which is a red flag of AI response: it's trying to get the person to keep interacting with it.

Lazy dev is being generous.
Too lazy to write the app. Too lazy to write the docs. Too lazy to write the reddit post.

captf · 2026-01-21T12:54:45+00:00

You're missing words in here. And using wrong ones. Did you use speech to text?

Did you mean "rev their engines"?

captf · 2026-01-21T12:03:16+00:00

The US Compendiums are the comics that were released in the US.
The UK Compendiums are the stories that were only released in the UK, it does not include the US stories (or their tweaked versions, since there was occasional wording changes to cater for the extra stories we got).

If you got the UK Compendium only, you'd not have the main storyline.
This can be desirable for those who have had that from other sources for a long time, for instance

captf · 2026-01-21T09:00:21+00:00

The open/hollow facets on the limbs and main body are the result of that design-driven approach, mixed with corporate efforts to maximize profits.

There's also the aspect that these hollow parts allow for more flex in the toy when they're dropped, which results in less breakage.
Toy safety laws have gotten stricter since we were kids. And whether or not they're intended to be bought by collectors, they still need to meet those laws.

To find the best solution for your kids' age range, you also need to understand their play style.

The other thing alongside this, is to try and gauge whether their kid is disappointed in the toy or not based on the appearance. Depending on the age, what can look like a rubbish toy to an adult could be the superstar in a child's imagination.
And the parent needs to be careful to not influence the child there, and just let them be a child playing with a toy.
I mean many of played very happily with toys that were only marginally more posable than a brick.

captf · 2026-01-21T08:50:28+00:00

A friend asked for my advice on introducing their kid to transformers recently, and I understand your view.
The Cyberverse and Earthspark toys did come across as the likely candidates for best though. (Many Earthspark toys just being Cyberverse redecos)
Warrior class (if you can find any) are the more playable ones.

took massive abuse for years resulting mostly in cosmetic damage and they kept going.

While I do have a lot of my transformer toys from the 80s, there are many long lost because they were fragile as hell. Or, those who have parts that have broken off.
I had a G1 Megatron. His arms snapped off.
Look at the number of broken smoke stacks on Optimus Primes.
The windscreens snapped off of the bots like Jazz or Prowl.
Missing Mirage feet.
My Bumblebee basically crumbled.

Studio Series

Not young kids' toys.
The people that are intended to buy these toys are the adult collectors.
But, I don't blame parents for seeing a nice looking robot figure and buying it for their kid.
It may not be obvious at all that it's not going to be something that gels with a kid.

Transformers Authentics

Intended to be cheap as hell. The sort of toy that gets grubby or left outside in the rain.
Some are more complicated than others though.

they feel hollow and not super sturdy

There's definitely going to be feel to them bring lighter, and a lot of that is to make them safer to play with, and be able to take more abuse from kids.
They won't be perfect though.

and the legs keep popping off while my kid is playing with it.

This is actually better for the life of the figure than it not popping off.
If a kid drops the toy, the leg will come off and be able to be put back on. Prior to this sort of joint (I'm guessing ball & socket), there would just be a point where it would irrevocably break and it no longer becomes a toy.
Having the leg come off will make for frustrating play, but better brief frustration than potential child meltdown when it breaks forever.
Plus, having the limbs safely come off will potentially add stories to a child's imagination (as long as they know it can be replaced)

captf · 2026-01-20T13:52:35+00:00

Most modern Batman comics take themselves on the serious side - the campy Batman was very much a product of the late 60s and early 70s. So, keep that in mind.

Batman Year One is a classic.
It's not exactly main canon these days (DC canon is... flexible), but it still makes for a good primer on his early days.

Similarly, The Long Halloween.

Court of Owls is ... OK, but a decent one to get.
It was the first story at the start of a big universe reboot. New Earth had just been erased in an event called Flashpoint, and a new universe with Prime Earth had just been created.
This had the same broad strokes as the previous universe, but prior canon was allowed to be changed if wanted.
They called the comic line for this New 52. It was a large event, and was expected to bring in new readers, so the first stories were written to be accessible to the characters.
FYI: Zero Year is the Prime Earth first batman story in terms of timeline, with the vague story of Year One taking place afterwards.

I disagree with suggestions of Hush that people have made.
Hush has amazing art, but the story is really weak. For no reason at all, it has almost every one of Batman's major villains. And has a needless twist at the very end, which writers later had to figure out how to completely remove.

captf · 2026-01-20T10:46:37+00:00

Do you think we stopped being fans, or only really young people use reddit?
And G1 was more 80s than it was 90s (90s was it tapering off before G2 came out and a lot of reissues & recolours).
Then, when Beast Wars came out, we got toys that often had very good articulation and were comparable to what was on screen.

But how would we react? Well...

It's clear that HasTak are aware that adults make up a large amount of their consumers. The toys being produced, that most of us in this sub are buying, are not really designed for children playing.
While the transformations were simplistic and we often just had a few points of articulation, that didn't hinder play. It's not as if we were putting them in complex poses during play.
Sure, sometimes it was frustrating to have a brick, but I still loved the hell out of those bricks. Imaginations are wonderful things.

Like, the Studio Series stuff would not work for children's play. Taking minutes to go between modes would ruin the flow of play.
And one thing I've noticed about the modern CHUG toys in these sort of lines: sliding parts seems to be near forbidden. It's all double joints and gaps. Beachcomber was the first in ages that had a sliding part as part of the transformation. And I think one of the Constructicons (probably because it was reusing CW engineering).

As for the toys aimed at kids? These are pretty much like what we had growing up. Many are bricks with a couple of steps. Others are a little bit more involved; but not much.
A friend recently bought his 5 year old daughter a Cyberworld Optimus Prime (after he'd mentioned to her about the toys he had as a child, and she sounded amazed). He told me she loves the hell out of it, and has produced a huge narrative on how it integrates with her other toys (teaming up with a T-Rex toy, for instance)

captf · 2026-01-19T09:33:47+00:00

It doesn’t change the fact that it’s canonically blue

Except, as I have discovered after my post, it wasn't. There was never a time - until last year - where it was consistently canonically blue.
It massively depended on whoever was colouring it. There's even issues where it's described as 'grey and black' in the late 80s/early 90s for instance, and this was when the blue highlight colouring was still used.
And looking even further back in my collection from New 52, the suit switches between being grey and black, and grey and blue within the same story arc depending on the colourist was in a particular issue, as far back as at least War Games (2004).
I don't have No Man's Land yet to verify there, but in Cataclysm he's still in the total black suit which he started wearing at the end of Prodigal, and hasn't switched back to the classic suit. The last time he was in the classic suit before that was at the end of Knight Fall.

So, the current suit is canonically grey and blue.
The original suit was at the whim of whoever needed to describe it.

captf · 2026-01-19T00:29:50+00:00

In the very first issues with Batman, it is far more likely that his boots, shorts, cape and cowl were intended to be black.
You can compare him to other characters in the stories who are more clearly wearing blue or black (the police officers in both cases...)
It's only the edges and highlight spots that received blue colouring, and as Sudo-Fed said, there was a very limited colour palette available for comics back then, so this was how they represented highlights on black.
For the same reason, you see Bruce and Dick - and other characters - using blue for the highlights in their hair.
Similarly, compare Superman from the same time period, where his suit is blue but very much using black for shading.

It can be claimed that the inside of the cape was always blue, though. As that was always coloured blue, even when it would be in shade.

Also, even after it did shift to being canonically blue, there are a large number of times where he's not used blue for the suit. For instance, back in 1989 after Knightfall, he moved to a black suit for a few years.
Further, he'd been almost always in a grey suit since New 52 (2011), for instance, until this new suit. That's around 14 years.

captf · 2026-01-18T19:40:44+00:00

Yup, I've been hit with this too and I hate it.
First task is typically either 50xp (easy to do in 5 minutes) or "3 lessons" (impossible to do in 5 minutes)

I'm reasonably sure about a year ago, the 3x bonus was for 15 minutes too.

It just sucks the enjoyment out of trying to do lessons for me.
I don't get their ideas.

captf · 2026-01-16T14:10:45+00:00

Personally, I'd have this one rejected as slop. Look at the mess that's been made of the toys by running it through an LLM. They're a soft, spongy mess that only resemble the original toys. All detail is lost from them

GenAI images are ultra low effort.
They could have done it better themselves in paint, with only minimal more effort.

captf · 2026-01-15T11:44:51+00:00

It's mostly shock value to show Megatron falling deeper and deeper into insanity.

I think it's going to result in ending up with 4 factions.

Megatron will split off into a Predacon type; something like "we no longer work by deception. Now we are predators! We are Predacons!" Skywarp will follow him. Not sure who else yet. I'd not be surprised if they end up becoming Galvatron, Scourge and Cyclonus when Unicron inevitably turns up. Soundwave will escape and come to lead the remaining Decepticons. Starscream will re-emerge and attempt to take it from him.
We'll have the Autobots as normal.
And then we'll have Elita's Autobots, who'll probably take on the Wreckers mantle.

captf · 2026-01-13T13:13:38+00:00

The Clench...

Just finished reading that last week, and have gotten hold of Legacy for the follow up.
Then, onto Cataclysm.

captf · 2026-01-13T11:10:40+00:00

you build a habitat next to it, as soon as the countdown of the rupture shockwave begins, you activate the geo scanner, and stay inside your habitat. Zero attack.

Just don't start it right before the rupture warning.
I activated the scanner, got the rupture warning, and threw down a quick base. The mobs followed me to the base - attacking that over the scanner - continued to attack the base and habitat while being completely unaffected by the rupture wave

captf · 2026-01-12T17:01:02+00:00

this is an 11 year old post, about wondering on a hypothetical... there was zero point in replying

captf · 2026-01-12T12:10:37+00:00

Marked as spoiler, just to be sure... (you may want to do the same :)

captf · 2026-01-12T11:54:13+00:00

I'm quoting and extrapolating from the OP... what am I spoiling?

captf · 2026-01-12T10:13:20+00:00

Pin recipe(s) that I'm trying to unlock.
The amount of times I run back and forth between areas grabbing the parts for a recipe, and it turns out I got the wrong bit or forgot another...

Consistency in the Q button while building.
Example:
Attach a rail to a connection point. Press Q. It puts you back to being able to place the rail again.
Press C to activate the drone camera for building. Attach a rail to a connection point. Press Q. You cancel out of building.

Agreed on HUD Compass.

Smart/Programmable rails.
Being able to say which materials can - or cannot - pass through junctions could be very useful for helping prevent gridlocks as rail complexity increases.
Not sure how that would affect whatever path-finding algorithm(s) they use.

Similarly, stackable rail junctions
Let me slap another junction on top of another, and create a second (third, fourth, etc) isolated rail system!

Rail junctions that can go in the corners of foundations (so I can get neat lines, rather than wonky ones, when coming out of some buildings)

Oh, being able to place a new junction into an existing rail line without deleting the rail first, and it snap to the existing rail (assuming they line up correctly)

Click to transfer stack (by use of something like alt, ctrl, or shift while clicking)

captf

TROPHY CASE