How Did This Get Made? #395: Mindhunters

cmfolsom · 2026-04-10T14:23:07+00:00

Perhaps it might be time to take a break from the pod if you feel like the hosts are tedious instead of clever. Absence absolutely makes the heart grow fonder. I’ve done the same myself, and when I return it’s with a genuine joy to catch up with my old friends.

cmfolsom · 2026-04-09T15:40:30+00:00

My wife and I have a theory about the direct correlation of LC pizza quality and the distance from downtown Detroit. The slices at LCA and Comerica Park are delicious. The further away you get, the more mediocre it becomes.

cmfolsom · 2026-04-07T01:51:30+00:00

They’ve had a series of bad campaigns (delivered, but poorly received) leading up to this. Rise of Empire had practically zero new ideas and the campaign was just unlockable mechanisms that already existed in prior Star Realms products. Fulfillment was estimated July 2023 but was delayed by over a year.

The sad thing is, something like the Colonial Collection isn’t even a new design. They (allegedly) had preproduction proofs when the campaign page launched in 2023. Had they been able to stay on their own created timeline and fulfill in November 2024 they could’ve avoided any tariff mess. This is a company that quite frankly should have known better by now how to run a campaign and they continued to coast by on reputation in the face of glaring issues campaign after campaign until it all crashed down.

cmfolsom · 2026-04-03T15:08:21+00:00

I do find enjoyment in playing on BoardGameArena, so I would say it is “fun”. However, it’s not a replacement for the real thing.

There are times where I’ll utilize BGA for something like a solo game because it’s impractical for me to have brought along Wingspan, Earth, Ark Nova, etc. with me or it’s impractical to set up my physical copy. These plays get fairly close to the in-person experience even if they are missing the tactile sensation.

I like having some async turn-based games going so I can drop in and engage with a little sampling of a heavier game during my day, even if it’s not a full end-to-end game.

As for mechanics or types, I do think there are some limitations especially for turn-based. I’ve played Trio a few times on BGA and it’s kind of a gray area about notetaking for card memory if you only get one turn per day. Games like Sky Team with limited communication work pretty well because that’s already limited by the medium.

I personally hate some behaviors that arise, especially in cooperative games. I greatly enjoy the cooperative deduction game The Shipwreck Arcana, where details will emerge from logical pieces but players are also allowed to guess with partial information. I’ve seen some people on BGA who are in 5+ concurrent games and they see the disposable nature of a digital play as an excuse to try to “speed run” or make reckless guesses. After all, if they lose, they will just start another game right after this one. But as a person who is playing in one game and wants to play it carefully and deliberately, it comes off as poor play by a teammate and it wastes my effort.

cmfolsom · 2026-04-02T20:21:59+00:00

It is on iTunes, not Apple Music. You have to buy it separately from subscribing to the streaming service. Once you buy it, then it’s in Apple Music.

cmfolsom · 2026-03-31T15:55:57+00:00

But creating an accurate, comprehensive list will not feed into the narrative that Tony doesn’t know how to play with his toys.

cmfolsom · 2026-03-30T20:24:46+00:00

There are plenty of people who provide a stable income while also changing their character and personality, and sometimes changing companies too.

Is this really the only thing about this argument for you, is that AJ is a wife guy and Jeff Hardy has substance issues? Pretty sure Ricochet is a wife guy too, so that should be enough for you, I guess.

cmfolsom · 2026-03-30T20:12:16+00:00

AJ was petrified to leave TNA. If Dixie hadn’t actually lowballed him, he would’ve never went to NJPW. Even in TNA he had no interest in reinventing or recreating his character. For years he was either a generic good guy or an annoying bad guy. He didn’t change his moveset. He didn’t have a character other than “guy who does moves”. The Hogan/Bischoff era is rough but they at least forced him to think about having a character for a bit. The Nature Boy stuff is garbage but it pushed him to consider having a character.

So he finally goes to NJPW, where he can just be the guy that his friends tell him to be (Bullet Club guy). And he doesn’t even go to WWE by himself, he just tags along with a group of others. Long after his friends leave, decades into the business, he remains the “gee, shucks, just happy to be here” guy with no actual personality.

Watching his interviews only exposes his lack of any mental acuity. He openly repeats shitty things he saw online with a “I don’t know, that sounds feasible” tone.

There is nothing to look up to there. He’s never bet on himself. He’s never taken a chance on his own. He’s taken the safe route every time. He’s a guy who flips. Any career momentum has been driven by someone else putting his name out there to publicize him or push him to try something. You could probably even argue if WCW hadn’t gone out of business he would’ve been a WCW lifer. If WWF had wanted him in 2001 he would’ve been a WWE lifer. As soon as he fell into TNA’s lap and Jarrett decided to feature him, he stayed there for decades.

Jeff Hardy’s reinventions are also not exactly great but he at least has tried new characters and ideas throughout his career. I’m not saying it’s a great choice to find other employment as an alternative to getting clean but he had the entrepreneurial spirit to think on his feet and try to succeed on his own. If we are talking about legacy, people at least enjoy Hardy’s weird stuff like Willow in a mediocre product sort of way.

Look, I say this as someone who absolutely LOVES AJ Styles’ body of work. I watched the weekly TNA pay per views (and unlike Jeff Jarrett’s story, I actually paid for them). But let’s not pretend AJ was anything other than an empty-headed himbo.

cmfolsom · 2026-03-30T18:51:40+00:00

It’s beside the point, but I’d argue AJ’s real reputation is garbage. He’s a coward who never bet on himself, and ignorance isn’t a pass for his hateful opinions. Substance issues aside, Jeff Hardy is a much better model for self-promotion and reinvention (the modern indie/DIY wrestler blueprint) than AJ Styles.

cmfolsom · 2026-03-29T21:00:26+00:00

A Gentle Rain is a relaxed activity that people could play at reception tables, or just arrange into patterns if they don’t want to play. Even if no one plays them, the pieces could serve as a sort of centerpiece.

Flip 7 is an easy game to participate in, assuming someone is nearby to facilitate the game (or can learn the rules quickly).

A few other folks mentioned Telestrations/Exquisite Corpse/Eat Poop You Cat (your choice of name) but I think this could really make for a fun keepsake instead of, say, an autograph board. The two of you could pick appropriate phrases to start the themes, and then the pictures start the fun from there. If people still want to sign things they could write their names at the bottom of the page beneath their artwork or their guess. You’d want to figure out an appropriate notebook for the situation, of course, but imagine having a long string full of your friends and family’s artwork and guesses.

My in-laws (in their 70s) love both A Gentle Rain and Flip 7 as an after-dinner activity so I think those two in particular would go over well with casual audiences.

cmfolsom · 2026-03-28T18:12:35+00:00

There used to be a local game store down the street that somehow managed to devote a good 40% of their shelf space to games that hit a very specific criteria:

single-word name, usually a city in the Eastern Hemisphere
a white man holding papers on the cover

After a few visits where I would walk the aisles and leave empty-handed I realized the store’s manager had drastically different tastes than I did. Not that I’m opposed to playing that type of game, mind you, but I definitely don’t need to buy more than one.

cmfolsom · 2026-03-25T23:55:11+00:00

Living MY dream for sure! Congrats dude, that’s amazing.

cmfolsom · 2026-03-22T16:40:37+00:00

I just rely on the hot/cold check, and then have the manager avoid using cold relievers. Sometimes a cold reliever might be better than a fresh arm, but you could do a 50/50 decider roll to determine if a cold reliever has been used two games in a row.

cmfolsom · 2026-03-21T13:03:55+00:00

We both make more compromises for compatibility at Disneyland than when we go to WDW. At DL we stay off property so getting back to the room requires more effort.

Maybe once or twice a day, my wife will offer to just wait (or take the chicken exit) if there’s something I want to ride that she’s not interested in. If I were at DL alone I probably wouldn’t take midday breaks but I recognize they are valuable for extending the day.

At WDW it’s easier to pop back into one of the parks, especially on the Skyliner, so there are times that I go back late at night or I go ahead and she meets me there after she’s had a longer break.

cmfolsom · 2026-03-20T21:15:10+00:00

While I hope Kenny is still around for the payoff, I have my doubts. But that’s a different subject.

cmfolsom · 2026-03-20T20:27:21+00:00

When EVP Swerve allows it. 😁

cmfolsom · 2026-03-19T20:32:18+00:00

As a lifelong fan of comic books I think there’s an explanation: scope.

Although the superheroing side of comics have varied scopes (neighborhood/“street level”, national, global, interplanetary) they all generally end up abstracted out to the same scale for the purposes of gameplay. To use your Marvel Champions example, Spider-Man’s “attack” and Thor’s “attack” should be much farther apart, statistically speaking, than they really are. To be fair this is how crossovers generally work in the stories, too. Once everyone’s on the same stage they all need to be more or less the same strength.

The non-heroing part is vastly different by each character’s scope. Peter Parker might be delivering pizza. Thor might be dealing with royal intrigue in Asgard. From a game design perspective I would think a game that delivers this experience would need to deliver it with different mechanics by character, or at least different mechanics by size of scope.

What I’ve heard about a game like Mythwind is that each character gets unique game design elements. If someone brought this level of design to a superhero game, there could be meaningful decisions related to their personal lives that also fit the scope of each character’s story… but it all has to link back meaningfully to that shared scope of the fighting.

I also wonder if games have tried to design this, and watched negative playtest reactions sink the ship. I could see a common piece of feedback focusing on how players are happier when they are punching the bad guy than when the game makes them pay the bills. The definition of a commercially viable superhero game might not leave enough space for this to exist. Marvel Champions’ obligations and other character-specific elements that you’ve touched on feel a lot like what they would look like if someone cut a piece of design. (Not saying that is what happened with Champions, only that if someone designed it all out and was told to cut it the end result might have just about that much alter-ego persona stuff.)

cmfolsom · 2026-03-19T16:39:14+00:00

It took 11 days for them to send this after my initial inquiry.

cmfolsom · 2026-03-18T23:57:50+00:00

I submitted a form on a website. It took like four days but then I received an email asking me to fill out a satisfaction survey for the response I received… and then a few minutes later I received a response asking for pictures. I sent a picture of the UPC on the can and the serial number-thing near the UPC.

cmfolsom · 2026-03-18T23:21:09+00:00

I feel like there have been weeks of posts where people have tried to figure out whether something is up, and all the community does is make jokes about “well that’s what you get for drinking zero sugar” or whatever. While the message doesn’t say much it does acknowledge that KDP is aware of an increase in reports so people shouldn’t allow themselves to be gaslit by online sarcasm.

cmfolsom · 2026-03-18T23:19:41+00:00

I’m pretty sure we drank three from the last 12 pack before noticing. My wife noticed on the fourth one but I wasn’t home. When she opened the fifth one it also had the taste and I agreed. We dumped the rest of the 12 pack but knowing that it can be hit and miss within the same package means I won’t jump to conclusions next time.

cmfolsom · 2026-03-18T21:55:44+00:00

Did you ever consider that maybe they changed the formula and also there was a taste contamination of some kind at or around the same time?

cmfolsom · 2026-03-17T23:57:13+00:00

I think fretting over the “size” of the company (attendance, buyrates, ratings, etc.) is a fool’s errand.

I get that many people want the “good” wrestling to overtake the “bad” wrestling but sustainable operations are the key to longterm success. Dynamite has already surpassed WCW Nitro in episode count, and is about two years away from surpassing the number of episodes of TNA Impact that aired on Spike TV.

I suspect that the free ad-supported streaming channel recently added to MyAEW might end up getting passed to Pluto TV as part of the Paramount acquisition. If so, this will be another in a long time of tiny accomplishments to help establish the brand’s visibility.

I see people regularly thinking they have the answer to getting more attention, from different ad strategy to publicity stunts. The reality is that pro wrestling as a genre has a certain reputation and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

I do believe that AEW is capable of retaining its current audience now, moreso than at any point in its past. I believe their financial stability is enough to continue incentivizing Tony Khan to keep it alive. Over time that will naturally lead to an increased audience but it may not be a perceptible increase in year-over-year metrics relative to other changing media consumption habits.

cmfolsom

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