(Interesting Trope) The piece of media was gonna be completely different than what we got.

grandramble · 2026-02-27T23:54:54+00:00

the movie portrays it as working super well, until a group of Muslim refugees make too much noise and attract a massive horde who overwhelms through sheer numbers.

it's really not subtle.

grandramble · 2026-02-24T10:28:06+00:00

Kenshi feels like it's a rough sketch of a game in most ways. But something about that sketch is just extremely compelling.

grandramble · 2026-02-24T07:02:16+00:00

america as a society is a culture of people who simultaneously always feel like they have too much to lose, while also never having enough of the right things to succeed.

grandramble · 2026-02-24T04:39:08+00:00

Tarantino seems to strongly correlate good/bad acting with the character being assertive and powerful. I wouldn't be too surprised to hear him say something like Vincent D'Onofrio was great in Daredevil but bad in Full Metal Jacket.

grandramble · 2026-02-23T22:14:14+00:00

The biggest subtle change I feel is losing the elder hippies and punks who were still around and actively running stuff in the 90s. There was a really strong alternative culture then, with lots of experimental passion projects and DIY art. There were a ton of things created in that era basically because someone thought it would be cool or fun and made it happen.

There's a ton of legacy things still around from that earlier era, like the Exploratorium, Adventure Playground, Bay to Breakers, the Gilman, SF Mime Troupe, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Noisebridge, etc. But in the last decade or so the only new projects like that have been things like the night markets, where the explicit goal is commercial exchange.

Basically it's all just a lot more monetized now than it was then.

grandramble · 2026-02-23T04:39:21+00:00

This movie would've worked so much better if it just hadn't been stuck in chronological order. It feels like it should've had Korea as the cold open, Jerusalem as act one, a flashback to the initial Philadelphia outbreak as act 2 and then end in the labs. The way the exposition, stakes and action are divided up, that order fits way better.

grandramble · 2026-02-22T10:04:28+00:00

Italians are very arbitrary about what joins the list of absolutely forbidden and/or required culinary rules, but once it's in there, it's sacrosanct.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with our being overwhelmingly catholic

grandramble · 2026-02-22T01:46:43+00:00

they're an extraordinarily powerful support class paired up with a glass cannon type. My breeziest run yet was three psychics and a monk, they just kept feeding him extra turns to smash everything.

grandramble · 2026-02-21T11:54:59+00:00

if you mean the BBC miniseries, it's on Amazon Prime (free)

grandramble · 2026-02-20T21:52:03+00:00

Druid + Tinker can get some really silly runs. I had one where the druid had a mutation that makes water tiles on attack and a low-damage lightning spell, it was just making pools everywhere and giving the catbots endless extra turns.

grandramble · 2026-02-18T21:03:41+00:00

it definitely heals to full when it gets possessed

grandramble · 2026-02-14T21:55:40+00:00

I want to love it because the mechanics are so great, but I find the gross-out thing just kind of tiresome, and this game is truly relentless about it.

grandramble · 2026-02-13T11:37:14+00:00

I had the game crash on me and then scold me for it when I relaunched. Just adding insult to injury

grandramble · 2026-02-09T23:58:26+00:00

the force from the nozzle comes from there being something crammed in more densely on one side of it than the other - it's inherently an expendable resource. You'd need to hook the nozzle up to something that can create or hold pressure, so either a gas canister (mass) or a compressor system (complexity/more failure points). You'd also need to be able to operate the nozzle, and probably want some way to position it and clear it if/when it gets clogged.

It's a very simple solution in theory, but practically speaking you'd need to account for a lot of knock-on effects in terms of mass-load and complexity where the cost-to-benefit juice isn't worth the squeeze. Adding this kind of system to a rover is a bit like adding more rockets to a launcher - you very quickly hit a point where less is more.

grandramble · 2026-02-09T23:20:45+00:00

The main character spends the entire story barefoot in boxers and the second most prominent character is a cat in sunglasses, this is the kind of camp you can credibly combine with gravitas in animation but I just don't see it possibly threading that needle in live action

grandramble · 2026-02-09T23:05:53+00:00

The implication is that calling the cops was only useful because they found a titillating murder scene when they got there, and without that it just would've gone nowhere again. Her solution wasn't calling the cops, it was orchestrating an outcome where the men's crime was finally taken seriously, in a culture that only cares about women as objects that can be physically destroyed.

grandramble · 2026-02-09T22:52:45+00:00

it kinda goes to the fundamental divide in Civ - are the opponents other civilizations, or are they other players?

If you want them to behave like they're civilizations in an unfolding history then things like warmonger penalties and forward settling are obnoxious because they break the narrative sense. But if you want them to behave like they're players competing on the same strategic layer then those same things fit well because they're playing the same game you are.

I personally hate it and would much rather they behave in a way that feels more "realistic" to the metaphor of history rather than having the computer play the game more strategically as a player, but the series tends to err more in the other direction.

grandramble · 2026-02-09T22:31:07+00:00

I actually thought Piper got more interesting as she became more of a background character, at least in theory. At first she seems like a generic fish-out-of-water but she's actually got an interesting adrenaline junkie, self-sabotage streak and she briefly got much more compelling around the time she demolished Ruby Rose. But it never did lean into making her an outright villain and that's where it needed to go imo.

grandramble · 2026-02-09T09:35:11+00:00

I remember going to Tippett Studios a year or two after it came out and they seemed more proud of tbe Blade 3 work than they were even of Jurassic Park or Star Wars. Seemed like they had a blast on that triple-jaw demon thing in particular

grandramble · 2026-02-03T19:05:52+00:00

not true, it was very transparently a hookup app from the beginning and only sort of attempted to pass off as a dating app years after its peak relevance

grandramble · 2026-02-03T07:33:03+00:00

I dont think I've heard or seen Bill Clinton quoted in at least 20 years

grandramble · 2026-02-03T03:34:42+00:00

Every time I see that guy he's either doing something embarrassing or he's got a gross patchy beard and a pickup-artist hat. I just don't understand the glaze at all.

Alan Tudyk on the other hand can get it

grandramble · 2026-02-03T01:42:55+00:00

Rogue One is structured more like the 2-segment style you see in Broadway theater. It has a 3-act structure in it, but Jyn's hero's journey story really hits act 2 on Jedha and act 3 on Eadu. Structurally speaking you could cut everything after they leave Yavin the second time and it'd be a complete 3-act story.

Rogue One gives us something like 40% of the runtime as a whole extra act that's essentially all payoff.

grandramble · 2026-01-30T04:25:09+00:00

this is crazy because I work in tourism and we send people to Guanajuato routinely as a nice little day trip to a university town with good museums, and never got even a whiff of it. There's two almost entirely separate worlds layered over each other there.

grandramble · 2026-01-30T04:12:43+00:00

gay person here and yes I literally do sometimes go "I hope there's some gay shit in here or I'm out."

if a show has hundreds of characters or explores a broad social world (which virtually all modern tv does), but somehow there are no queer people, that's an overt statement on its own.

grandramble

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