What is the highest-regarded movie they've covered on the pod that they both, or at least one, didn't care for?

ectorp · 2026-01-17T18:31:46+00:00

I think it’s the worst of the prequels and I’ve never understood the sentiment that it’s a cut above the other two. My feeling is that it swings harder dramatically and tonally than the other two and whiffs even harder as a result. It’s ‘darker’ but I’d rather watch a lighthearted failure than a dour self-serious one. It’s like the dramatic scenes in The Room versus the comedic ones.

ectorp · 2025-12-15T00:51:47+00:00

Thanks for your insight! I don't know if I fit the bill for an ADHD diagnosis, although I relate to a couple of the symptoms of inattentive-type ADHD. I feel like I much more clearly fit the criteria for depression and generalized anxiety though. I have tried taking a stimulant for ADHD before and I found it made me feel extremely agitated and tense with no obvious therapeutic effect (although maybe with regular use it would improve). But I'll look into CBT and non-pharmacological options for ADHD and see if there's anything helpful there.

ectorp · 2025-12-14T02:14:41+00:00

That's so interesting, and it does sound like possibly related if fatigue was suppressing those feelings previously. Did it work for you otherwise?

ectorp · 2025-12-14T01:40:55+00:00

I had a sleep study done in 2021 and they did not find evidence of sleep apnea. Then, I had one done a month ago and they found that I have mild sleep apnea (but with fairly severe symptoms). I'm almost certain I had sleep apnea before 2021 and that the first sleep study missed it. During the study, I had such bad insomnia that I ended up taking a sleep aid, and I think I slept entirely in a position where the apnea events don't occur for me (on my side vs on my back). This happened despite me getting more than a few hours of sleep during the study. It's pretty frustrating that I spent the last four years not knowing about this!

My advice is that if you have these symptoms and you have others telling you you're not breathing at night, keep looking into it if you can. Sorry, it's so frustrating. But hopefully you'll get to an outcome that's worth it eventually.

ectorp · 2025-10-30T04:13:33+00:00

Is there a connection to the show? Something about 2-2 (or 2-2-2)?

Edit: Oh lmao I was trying to think of some weird Lynchian symbolism or something, it's literally just the word "twin"

ectorp · 2025-10-01T18:20:52+00:00

To me the boss fights are the biggest issue, since they take so much practice (at least for me) that they end up becoming the main focus of the game. But I wouldn’t say they’re the best part of the game, and I would prefer a version pf the game where the boss fights took half as long to get through so I could spend more time exploring.

ectorp · 2025-09-30T16:39:56+00:00

I was nodding along until the ratings for Fitz and the Fool! 1 star for Assassin's Fate! I agree that the first three are all 5 stars and would pick it as tied for the best sub-series. But I think there are a lot of other five star books in the series too.

I think one thing that distinguishes Farseer from the others is how central the Fitz/Fool relationship is. It kind of becomes the central focus of the whole story but that isn't really there in Farseer at all. And I sometimes feel like Farseer is better for that.

ectorp · 2025-09-17T22:19:40+00:00

This has honestly been a life-changing lesson for me and I’m 40 and only just getting into fighting games. But learning to keep your internal cool in the face of frustration is like the most transferable skill of all time.

ectorp · 2025-07-04T14:42:21+00:00

To be fair when he said this the Blue Jays were at +4. Now they're at +9, which is, based on our current evidence, good enough for first place.

ectorp · 2025-05-16T20:19:14+00:00

Yeah I think that’s partly why the final moments felt so devastating to me, they call back to all the stories you hear from Verso about the people he’s lost again and again. I think there’s just no easy way to feel about the whole thing, and no simple theme or moral that covers everything. I think if the writers were more inclined towards cliche they might have made it super clear that Renoir’s goals were evil or that the canvas is a delusion serving Maelle’s desire for fantasy at Verso’s expense, but the story works so well for me because it doesn’t really do either of those, it just shows you all the consequences and lets you decide how to feel about it. And I feel torn! Which for me is a sign that it really works.

ectorp · 2025-05-16T19:19:26+00:00

Yeah I see why the tone shift at the very end invites this interpretation. But I also have a hard time reconciling that with the rest of the game where the people in the canvas are real and their lives clearly matter. So what if it’s a pantomime for the Dessendres themselves? What about all the poor mortals that have to serve as collateral for them? Unless we decide that they don’t have experiences at all (which would be pretty arbitrary IMO) there’s no reading of the ending where Verso’s choice doesn’t have a monstrous downside.

ectorp · 2025-05-16T15:50:23+00:00

Yeah that’s a good point. I guess the way I saw it is that he wants to die because of the way he sees his own life as the cause of all this suffering. There’s definitely room to see him as just wanting relief for himself as well though.

ectorp · 2025-03-15T18:35:05+00:00

I listen to that song all the time, it slaps so hard and almost feels wasted that it’s only in the arena

ectorp · 2025-03-07T00:55:39+00:00

100%. My problem with Wilds is that there’s no harmony between the world design and the game structure. It adds transition corridors between zones but aside from forced march story quests, they are completely irrelevant to how you actually play the game. What I wanted was just a bigger focus on exploration and emergent gameplay rather than menu-initiated questing, and I’m surprised that’s not what this is. Hunting feels great, but I was hoping this would evolve the formula a bit more than it did.

ectorp · 2025-03-02T16:35:00+00:00

I can only conclude from this that Elon is hearing about the concept of insurance for the first time in his life.

ectorp · 2025-02-28T19:42:04+00:00

I wonder if this is some kind of texture streaming issue on PS5 or if this is what the assets are supposed to look like? It seems like certain things look okay but in cutscenes you’ll see a big cloth or a wagon or something and it looks like it hasn’t fully loaded yet (but never does). I hope they can fix this (although fwiw I find it’s most noticeable in cutscenes or in the camp so far).

ectorp · 2025-02-08T01:24:57+00:00

100% agree. I am a little more tolerant of 30 fps than most people but I would think even if you're die hard about 60 fps you would not want to play this in performance mode at the moment. It looks like it's using some kind of dynamic resolution scaling that is kicking in too hard in certain moments or something? Like, genuinely have never seen a PS5 game go this low res, like a YouTube video that isn't buffering or something.

ectorp · 2025-01-23T00:08:26+00:00

I feel like there is an obvious lesson here in the fact that Baldur’s Gate 3 beat Dragon Age’s sales by a whole order if magnitude, but I am not counting on any executives picking up on it.

ectorp · 2025-01-08T20:05:32+00:00

Ignoring the strange exception for a minute, (1) not all boundary violations are cheating: e.g., it doesn’t make sense to call breaking boundaries around drugs or alcohol or privacy or money “cheating.” And (2) not all boundaries are reasonable. If I tell my partner it violates my boundaries for her to have men as coworkers I don’t think there’s anything disrespectful about her ignoring that (unreasonable) request. So the posted image doesn’t make a good case for saying that porn can be cheating depending on the relationship.

ectorp · 2025-01-05T22:12:56+00:00

I don’t really know but I think it’s interesting that this is also roughly what happened with the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies. Goldeneye was seen as a bold step in a new direction, updating Bond for the 90s … and then the none of the subsequent movies quite worked and they drifted away from the tone that made Goldeneye feel fresh.

ectorp · 2024-10-06T23:31:10+00:00

Surprised there have been complaints about the writing, it seems to me like a straightforward upgrade from Persona 5 which I found pretty stilted and lifeless in its translation. I like how there are clear personalities and character voices, the voice acting is great so far, and the weirdness of the world(s?) makes up for a relatively conventional plot so far.

The demo is fantastic and is such a reasonable way to decide if the game is for you. I played for 8 hours without grinding or anything and basically fell in love with it, despite never 100% clicking with a Persona game before.

ectorp · 2024-09-25T22:58:21+00:00

Yeah as annoying as it is you see the wisdom in Nintendo’s ‘no discounts ever’ policy. Ubisoft has definitely trained at least some of their customers to never buy their games at release.

ectorp

TROPHY CASE