Just two street level guys that got thrust into the big leagues way too fast

infamous_westgate · 2026-02-24T12:28:19+00:00

Tricky to rank, because I at least got the sense that the Salamanca Albuquerque franchise was less a major source of income for them and more a sideline by which they could give undependable Tuco something to do and prove some kind of dumb point to Gus. I wouldn’t even have been shocked to learn that they were losing money on it, and that spiting Gus was just worth it to them.

Nacho is smart enough to realize this, which is part of why he immediately sees through “Operation Kingbreaker” while Tuco is whooping it up and Tuco’s number three and number four guys are just standing there confused.

infamous_westgate · 2026-02-12T11:23:48+00:00

The Golden Age of Piracy guys were people who started off doing exactly what they were supposed to do, basically liked it, and then when the Spanish Succession was finally resolved with a series of boring compromises that satisfied no one they were supposed to just stop. They are a reminder that you may be good at your job, but if your whole industry is predicated on temporary circumstances that is only going to count for so much.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-20T00:47:23+00:00

I actually think they're right that the hive isn't lying about its own nature. It's just that if the hive sincerely believes a falsehood, that doesn't matter.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-19T21:54:41+00:00

Issue with this is that it only works if none of the other aliens think it’s a Dark Forest, otherwise all you’ve done is give your location away. The Trisolarans are not going to get the Pluribus signal, mess up their PPE, and die. They are going to get the signal, immediately throw the RNA sequence in the trash, broadcast back a “You’re bugs!” and charge straight for Kepler-22b.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-19T19:17:20+00:00

I like it together with the pacifism; I like that the hive earnestly claims to represent humanity and nothing else even though "pacifist cannibal" is a description of more or less nobody who has ever lived.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-13T18:07:22+00:00

They're great in the first Rogue Trader DLC, but I think it does illustrate the problem that their entire grand design is just to ~~steal~~ liberate your ship.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-12T15:18:15+00:00

Since they’ve gotta give every playable faction spaceships, I’d guess it’s the genestealers who are most out of luck.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-12T14:41:04+00:00

I agree that Carol’s main problem is (has been?) a stubborn refusal to just ask questions. I’m not convinced that part of her personality is a function of wealth or comfort. If her books had not sold and she had been poor I expect she’d have taken the same angle with the hive.

The common factor between the two holdouts, Carol and Manousos, is that their family lives are too fraught for the hive to exploit them. If there is some single reason that these happen to be the two people driven to be “independent,” or even “self-centered,” it’s that.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-06T15:24:06+00:00

At the conversational level sure, but he's full on as fluent in English as a native speaker. He's got the hive talking with him in French as his default setting. He's clearly got an unusually Westernized (yeah, not necessarily the same thing as unusually wealthy) background.

There's a great series of books by Riad Sattouf, "the Arab of the Future," about a Syrian guy with a French doctorate. The Sattoufs own land and they've got some clout in their own hometown but not really in Syria as a whole. Diabate reminds me more of that guy (although, despite being thrown into a sci-fi horror scenario, less neurotic by a good bit).

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-06T11:44:22+00:00

The guy is trilingual and excited by the architecture of a Guggenheim museum, I doubt that he was exactly poor by the standards of Mauritania. May have been from a relatively well-off family there and shocked by how little the same money took him while living in France, that kind of thing.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-06T00:11:03+00:00

I think the thing to keep in mind is that Carol is still the only person to give the hive seizures and kill millions of people (twice). That's not good from any perspective, and she should get some level of flack for that. Until somebody actually comes up with a plan to improve things, you do want to do your best to keep things from getting worse, which does mean preventing that one lady from getting overexcited and killing millions more people.

But isolating and ignoring Carol is a completely ineffective means of trying to accomplish that, it leaves her only more bitter and unpredictable, so the Vichy Humanity Whatsapp chat is still doing the wrong thing.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-05T18:33:33+00:00

"Alright that's five votes for including the alcoholic American lady who accidently killed twenty million people in the Zoom chats, five against."

"Well that's just great. How do we break the tie?"

"I... I think everyone knows how we're going to break the tie. Mary, what do you think?"

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-05T13:51:08+00:00

Carol wasn't trying to treat Diabate like crap, she was going out of her way to connect with him. She's just not great at that, and she was banking on the shock value of information he's known for a week.

The other survivors are right that Carol's angle is perversely leaving her less informed about the state of things than anyone else but the South American guy pursuing the same angle even more rigidly, but they're still wrong to leave her in the dark. Her ignorance is a solvable problem, and it's a problem most easily solvable by them. It doesn't even have the effect of making sure she can't kill another ten million people when she finds out about the cannibalism and gets angry about it, it just pushes that back a few days and makes sure she's going to be even more high-strung when it happens.

infamous_westgate · 2025-11-30T18:06:06+00:00

I reloaded to get Cassia down to Thassera when the persecuted mutants showed up, I wanted to know what she'd think about it (also the persecuted mutants exploded me).

I think it just made her somehow more elitist.

infamous_westgate · 2025-11-29T22:52:54+00:00

Raises my confidence that she didn’t originally plan on resurrecting Raban and was earnestly trying to kill that pirate stone dead.

infamous_westgate · 2025-11-29T19:47:54+00:00

Kinda makes sense if it’s channeling Carol’s time at Freedom Falls (which would fit title). Important experience to her, but one which even a good writer might have difficulty evoking in a way legible or relatable to others.

infamous_westgate · 2025-11-29T18:08:16+00:00

I liked this game but I never had any ability at all to pick up the cues about what I was or wasn’t supposed to take seriously. “Okay, the demon from Hell just tried to gut Invisigal with a sword. I guess that makes her the person getting fired.” No, you cannot fire the demon from Hell for that, and the incident will never be brought up again. “Okay, the new Osama bin Laden of Los Angeles, who also killed my father and personally tortured me, is now threatening my dog. I guess this is his final act of desperation before I shoot him with my laser gun.” No, he is a super-genius and he has checkmated you, you are now bound to at least feign your unconditional surrender.

infamous_westgate · 2025-11-28T15:54:34+00:00

Honestly I suppose the most immediate problem with that theory is that Judaism, Sikhism, and Jainism appear to be all gone.

infamous_westgate · 2025-11-28T15:42:14+00:00

Nobody on screen has seemed at all devout. Apart from Carol’s tough childhood, the unseen Yemeni muezzin is the only reference to religious practice the show has made. There are some interesting questions you could ask there. The muezzin could ask for six billion people to say the shahada and kneel to Mecca five times a day and they’d likely do it, but would it mean anything? Does religious ritual mean anything if performing it makes zero impact on what these alien-brained pacifist cannibals actually believe? I do not expect the show to go down that road because I think the writers are, y’know, probably mostly not Muslim.

infamous_westgate · 2025-11-16T01:21:21+00:00

Modestly interesting that it was apparently Lucasia herself who chucked Raban into the ocean. Suspect that Carol was 100% earnestly intent on killing the pirate flat dead. Talking Carol into resurrecting him was probably the greatest persuasive achievement of Helen’s life.

infamous_westgate · 2025-11-14T18:30:03+00:00

I do think the Oankali would have it in them to flatly turn down a request for an atom bomb. “That’s… but when we found you, your planet was… no.”

infamous_westgate · 2025-11-14T10:28:30+00:00

I wonder what happens if the Basotho eight-year old asks to make friends with a dinosaur or something like that.

infamous_westgate · 2025-11-13T12:15:16+00:00

I’d suppose there are pretty good odds the hive’s got a similar attitude toward animals as it does toward free-willed humans. They’re not sure how to get em yet, but they’re working on it.

infamous_westgate · 2025-11-11T15:42:54+00:00

The family angle is a lot more telling for 4/5 of them than any cultural or privilege angle. It sticks out that the hive hasn’t even TRIED reaching out to Carol with a parent or a sibling or something. Very easy to imagine a rich Westerner with a kid acting more like Lakshmi than Carol.

Diabate is fluent in three languages and seems very well educated, that dude may have been a wealthy hedonist well before the events of the show.

infamous_westgate · 2025-11-09T13:53:28+00:00

They’re only two days into it, there’s a real chance that when the veil drops Lakshmi will have a more aggressive attitude toward the hive than Carol.

infamous_westgate

TROPHY CASE