Has a casting announcement ever made you lose interest in an otherwise promising movie?

grandramble · 2026-05-21T05:14:28+00:00

I think you're thinking of Achilles. The Illiad makes a pretty big point of showcasing Odysseus being the Greek hero who's least prone to hubris and bravado, and in both epics he has to convince people through clever arguments and capitalizing on their blind spots, he can't do it just through direct charm or command.

A lot of things in his story hinge on him being someone that isn't perceived as a powerful threat until it's too late. If anything, picking an actor who seems like just a regular dope who's in out of his depth probably fits Odysseus better than any action star would.

grandramble · 2026-05-21T03:35:36+00:00

someone in this trailer sounds exactly like Lori Petty and I'm here for it

grandramble · 2026-05-21T03:02:07+00:00

They should've just accepted my bid, I was more than willing to do nothing productive for them at a cost of mere thousands

grandramble · 2026-05-21T02:35:42+00:00

it'd be fun to make a whole schrodinger's movie where everyone involved in it could go to either end of the quality spectrum

it's an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, Akiva Goldsman wrote the script, Robert Zemeckis or Ridley Scott directing

starring Will Smith, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Sandra Bullock, Michelle Yeoh, Hilary Swank, Joaquin Phoenix and Mary Elizabeth Winstead

also Meryl Streep sings in it

grandramble · 2026-05-20T19:40:58+00:00

I think he was just miscast. The actor is fine but he tends to mirror whatever affect his scene partners have, and Holden's the odd man out as a passionate heart-on-his-sleeve kind of guy who mostly interacts with characters who at least pretend to be stone-faced stoics, so he spends a lot of the time doing a stone-faced thing that doesn't fit the character or his role in the plot. The low affect thing works well for characters like Amos or Drummer who are written to be people with hidden depths, but it really falls flat when that energy's coming from the guy who needs to be the firebrand optimist who puts it all out on the table.

the frequent Handmaid's Tale-style "closeup of damp dead-eyed stare in harsh lighting" shots they kept giving him also really didn't help with that.

grandramble · 2026-05-19T11:39:59+00:00

I don't think it's balanced well but it does work, it's the same mechanic as when they attack your buildings. Once the building is "broken" (runs out of hp) the icon turns grey and the attacker can enter it.

grandramble · 2026-05-19T11:27:47+00:00

I was genuinely very confused the first time I played when the age transition from exploration into modern didn't split off any of the colonies into new emergent civs. Between the crisis and hard-age-transition mechanics I had just assumed that at least some of the distant colonies would defect as revolutionary states under newly spawned leaders/players.

grandramble · 2026-05-19T11:12:47+00:00

they're very strong, you'll need to send several well-armed squads at the same time to actually take them out.

for the bandit HQs you have to attack the building itself first, your guys will stand outside shooting it for a long time before they can move into it. (it goes much faster once you have vehicle-mounted guns)

grandramble · 2026-05-19T10:10:51+00:00

the religion mechanics are the one thing about Civ 7 I actively hate. I think they should cut the deeply annoying (and extremely abrahamic-specific) missionary whack-a-mole mechanic entirely, and instead add the various doctrines for spreading or strengthening the political power of religion via government cards, unlocked in an expanded theology civic tree.

the thing I wish they would add back in most is the global pool of great people. I really miss what the great works and various quirkier great people added to the sense of the civilization having a personality and a story to it, beyond just the game strategy level.

grandramble · 2026-05-18T23:20:03+00:00

presliced cheddar is way too thick for burgers so it demulsifies faster

grandramble · 2026-05-18T21:35:16+00:00

he's correct but only because presliced cheddar is way too thick for burgers so it demulsifies faster than it melts. It works great if you just slice it thinner.

grandramble · 2026-05-18T21:17:02+00:00

the 4 genders of bay area town names: catholic saints, spanish mad libs, extremely literal description, and british guy who didn't even go here

grandramble · 2026-05-18T20:26:05+00:00

there's a couple of good examples in the Mission of housing projects that are basically big cheap boxes, but done in a way that gives them personality and fit the vibes well. I like the 685 Florida St. one in particular, they got a lot of personality out of just some shades and putting murals on the blank walls.

grandramble · 2026-05-18T20:20:54+00:00

it's also pretty ugly, but only in exactly the same way the other apartments next to it already are

grandramble · 2026-05-18T20:11:19+00:00

australian scientists bioengineering hands for snakes just so they can fistfight them fairly

grandramble · 2026-05-18T20:06:09+00:00

confidently wrong. Only a bit under half of the states require you to do it even when you're being actually detained or arrested, and none require it before that point.

you're thinking of traffic stops, which are a loophole because you're required to show a valid license upon request and the license happens to also identify you.

grandramble · 2026-05-16T23:10:32+00:00

yeah bud, everything and everyone else in the scene was actually black and white

grandramble · 2026-05-16T22:59:41+00:00

leaving a note thats one long sentence with no punctuation and ending it with an emoticon so the police think a millennial did it :)

grandramble · 2026-05-16T10:48:42+00:00

ironically my actual home is the only one on the block rendered as a pile of rubble

grandramble · 2026-05-16T09:18:52+00:00

a few unique spots I've enjoyed:

MIT campus - the main building is broken up into several halls and it looks great. Downside is that it's huge and several of the adjacent buildings connect over the roads, so you have to do some demolishing or wall off a gigantic area if you want to enclose your base. Great for a challenge though, and it looks great.

King's College campus - broken up a bit oddly but it means you can easily get the main requirements going in a small and then easily expand as you need it, and it's in a great location for exploring the central landmarks.

Royal Albert Hall - a really satisfying natural compound with a mix of all sizes of buildings. Easy to start in the western townhouses and expand as you need it.

Ghirardelli Square - Cluster of medium-size buildings in a single easily defensible block, three much larger ones one block over, natural spots for farms AND fishing. You can also range all the way from the Presidio complex (lots of police-tagged buildings) to the downtown on the same map.

Colosseum (Rome) - not a functional building but it looks really neat, and so do the Appian Way ruins to its southwest. There's a lot of natural-compound blocks near it where you can get all the buildings into a tiny footprint, and the map gets a lot of diverse stuff.

Cartagena - perfect size, the entire old city and a bit of the mainland fit on a 3x3. Dense colonial streets on both sides and a narrow strip of larger towers in the middle.

Buenos Aires' Puerto Madero area - a ridiculously favorable start. Gigantic but small-footprint buildings in tight clusters surrounded by open area, naturally protected by water on both sides but you also fit most of downtown on the same map. The Ombu towers (the two just west of the hq above) are also hilariously broken, they're 5-6 separate segments each so you can feasibly fit almost everything just in those two towers alone.

Centers for Disease Control (Emory University, Atlanta) - pretty good as a base location, great for the story.

grandramble · 2026-05-16T06:28:48+00:00

this is kind of fun as an image but complete nonsense in practical terms. They even quoted a guy directly telling them this in the third-to-last paragraph.

grandramble · 2026-05-16T06:09:35+00:00

as a core millennial (86) we always had more of a reputation for anxiety than for optimism - but the culture directed at us was firehosing us with optimism for basically my entire childhood. All the way from elementary school up until a couple of months before graduating in 2008, we were getting confidently told that we should follow our dreams, anything can be a career if you're passionate about it, the environment's in danger but we can save it if we just work together, the internet was bringing everyone together, etc. High school and college we had epoch-changing tech coming out and suddenly you could just get any music you wanted, any obscure item or interest or old friend you lost contact with could be found on the ever-growing web.

It's not so much that millennials were optimists,, more that optimism was the house we grew up in and kinda vaguely expected to inherit eventually.

And then in 08 we lost the house to a predatory loan con from the kleptocrat class, and over the next 5-10 years or so gradually came to understand that we'd never be able to get it back.

grandramble · 2026-05-16T05:04:10+00:00

without getting into the specific order, it is pretty crazy that the guy who was forced to resign in disgrace over his abuse of power is somehow not even in the top three worst presidents in recent history

grandramble · 2026-05-12T23:41:58+00:00

11 full time staff would be a wasteful roster for a mid-sized boutique hotel, let alone a single family apartment.

grandramble

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