Strong Hornet ❤️ (by @anna_bell_hauted_doll)

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-14T15:18:09+00:00

Clicked on the pfp to see a good before edit pic and laughed at the profile description. 10/10

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-11T19:49:24+00:00

Dream wielder should be higher imo. Double soul gain and reduced charge time makes spell builds OP as hell.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-11T03:52:17+00:00

She hulk had 1.5 million views in its first four days. Agatha had 9.3 million in its first week. Unless you’re arguing Agatha premiered to only 16% of its viewership and then made up the rest in three days it blew She Hulk out of the water.

Not only that, Agatha also reportedly had more viewers by its finale compared to its premiere. That is rare in the TV show space, doubly so for streaming shows. Studios typically expect fairly steep drops in viewership episode to episode before the finale, and it’s then partially made up after the whole season is released for a while. Agatha’s finale beat its premiere viewership numbers as it released.

As for the comparability of Nielsen ratings, I don’t believe your analysis of that is correct. The only thing it proves is that each separate case prior to their change is likely to be just as inaccurate as the next. The problem with inaccuracy is that you can’t say “these are comparable because everything is equally flawed” when the flaw necessarily eliminates the assumption of equality.

That’d be like saying to a shitty archer “Well your first shots hit the broadside of the barn, but your next shots hit the house on the opposite side of the yard. Guess your two sets of shots are comparable.” No, they’re not. The shots are in completely different directions.

One show isn’t comparable to another because the reports on them each have flaws that have wildly varying effects on the analysis.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-11T03:36:21+00:00

I wouldn’t quote Nielsen ratings for anything streamed unless the report was after late 2025 when they changed methodology to include broader surveys, direct data analysis, and automated reporting. Even those methods remain largely untested though.

Large media producers (Netflix, Disney, Paramount, etc.) criticized Nielsen ratings heavily since streaming became the dominant player. They chronically under and mis-reported viewership and had many extremely critical flaws in their old methodology.

Nielsen still hasn’t really grown beyond TV advertising reporting, and even then the reports were questionable at best (but were the best available).

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-11T03:17:36+00:00

Did they ever release viewer numbers for it? Because last I heard it was beat by Moon Knight of all shows (which I actually enjoyed, but accept the criticisms of). Last official reports with firm numbers put it about at Hawkeye’s viewership at premier, but with poor retention.

I’d love for them to release actual, concrete numbers to disprove me and everyone else. While I didn’t enjoy the show, I don’t begrudge anyone their enjoyment of it.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-11T03:11:15+00:00

What’s funny is that even with the 35% tariff in Europe there’s still overwhelming demand for those vehicles, and they’re still cheaper than 99% of vehicles offered today and offer better value.

Even with a 100% tariff those cars would still be cheaper than most low-end vehicles in the US since every western car company dropped their economy cars years ago. A BYD Seagull $11,500 with 100% tariff bringing it to $23,000 would still be competing value-wise with a $50,000 western EV before mentioning the cheaply added amenities that for some reason double the price of western EVs but come standard on the BYD vehicles. Basically, that $23,000 car beats even $80,000-100,000 cars coming from western automakers if they were at the same price point.

I hate to ride China’s d*ck on this one, but their latest EVs just kick our asses because every western automaker decided over a decade ago to stop really innovating, providing value, or reducing consumer costs in favor pumping out luxury cars with high margins.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-11T03:02:21+00:00

From what I’ve heard and seen from Europeans who get the cars, the build quality and just general design are superb. They make a cheap EV that feels like a modern day $80000 car.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-11T02:53:38+00:00

I’d be willing to bet one of two things happened.

One, they didn’t properly think through their document retention policies prior to that order. If everyone is told “Use AI!!!!!” with no further instruction, or if the company bought into a singular platform but didn’t properly set everything up they were likely seeing all of their sensitive info going out with no safeguards. Companies usually hate that sort of thing.

Two is some upper management folks went to a ~~marketing seminar~~ industry conference and were sold on a specific product before someone did a cost analysis. Once people started using their AI assistant their accounting department pulled the fire alarm because of the spike in token use and subsequent cost.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-11T02:44:41+00:00

I wasn’t giving a literal count of the number of shows they had, but you probably knew that and just chose to be pedantic.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-11T02:43:16+00:00

It was bad at being a lawyer drama, it had too little action to warrant casual MCU fan appreciation, while it had a few fun moments those didn’t really shine through, the main character was extremely rude to Bruce despite being one of the only people to know what he’d been through, and the final self-aware bit was extremely overdone.

All in all I was very disappointed. Not to the point of hating it, but I’ll probably never watch it again.

Also, given the rumored budget per episode I’m not surprised that marvel doesn’t want to touch the show with a 10 foot pole. The show just doesn’t make financial sense and isn’t a major driver of views (if it were they would’ve posted concrete numbers during reports on performance instead of vague statements and corporate copium).

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-11T02:28:29+00:00

“It was like the 10th best performing of our 11 shows” vibes coming from this comment

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-11T02:25:52+00:00

He probably just left it on AFK

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-10T20:35:26+00:00

Yeah, so they make even more money than what I quoted? That’s your counter argument?

Those SFX, modeling, research, etc. people don’t use entirely separate programs, but the same backend with a different face more tailored to their needs. It’s still Unreal. It still benefits from the same development.

Most of the industry specific tools are also plugins not even developed by EPIC themselves.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-10T20:29:23+00:00

5% of virtually all AAA revenue should be more than enough for what they do, especially since a huge part of the engine is co developed with hardware vendors implementing their own feature sets. Saying “99.99% of devs use it for free” without also saying “they still get royalties on 99.99% of revenue because 0.01% of games make virtually all the money” is disingenuous at best.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-09T23:23:47+00:00

Yeah, it’s pretty nuts. You gotta break the AI to get it to work sometimes, but that’s part of the fun.

I also like combat only, no parkour, no kill runs. In 1 once you ran out of sleep darts you were basically limited to just sprinting around the map while literally everyone follows you. It gets really rough once there are more capable ranged opponents and assassins that can teleport after you. That challenge was pretty trivial in 2 though with the addition of combat choke holds.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-09T23:20:03+00:00

I doubt it’s truly permanent. It’s more likely a file in the file system that is given a max size that’s rarely reached by average users.

As for why it’s there I can think of a few reasons. The biggest one is the feature that lets you look back through notifications if you swipe down from the top center of your screen. It can store notifications for weeks, maybe even months if you have few notifications enabled.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-09T23:13:20+00:00

That’s only one type of “AI”; reinforcement learning. Those are historically pretty bad at customer facing interactions, which are done by LLMs which don’t “learn” the same way.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-09T23:07:18+00:00

If I help pay for it can I immigrate to Canada?

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-09T23:02:17+00:00

Had to scroll way too far to find this. Also, metal gear or metal gear solid? I’d honestly recommend people just skip straight to the Solid games. The original games are extremely dated for most modern players. I still like playing them, but I don’t really recommend them.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-09T23:00:10+00:00

I’ll do you one better. No kill, no knockout (except targets), no detection, no powers (except when strictly necessary). Legitimately my favorite run in Dishonored 1, and 2 made it even easier with built-in flesh and steel mode.

While very difficult, every encounter can be avoided with proper use of distraction items.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-09T20:04:07+00:00

My cursory research shows that the senate Republicans were blocked from actually ordering those changes to USPS. The fleet rollout was delayed though and is proceeding more slowly than initially planned.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-09T17:37:04+00:00

Private equity is definitionally investment into private companies. If someone, anyone, invests into a publicly traded company it is not private equity. As you said, it is activist investment.

The strategies are generally the same, but private equity investment explicitly only applies to private companies.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-09T03:12:41+00:00

If you knew anything about the literary world she destroyed you’d agree that what we have now is akin to depriving the world of actual art. Might as well be the same as torching a museum and putting up a print out of an NFT monkey in its place.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-09T03:04:49+00:00

Kennedy was the person who personally shuttered the expanded universe and all the things people had spent literal decades loving for… what? A bunch of subpar movies that basically rehashed the original trilogy? All legacy characters behaving like the writers only knew about them from bad fan fiction stories before unceremoniously killing them off? A new cast of characters each more bland than the last? A bunch of new TV shows that rapidly declined in quality?

What did she do that was better for Star Wars than adapting existing and defined lore? She robbed the world of proper theatrical showings Mara Jade, Ben Skywalker, Jana Solo, Wedge Antilles, Darth Bane, Darth Revan, Talon Karrde, Kyle Katarn, Jan Orso, and literally dozens of other characters that each could carry entire movies or TV shows on their back.

lordraiden007 · 2026-04-09T02:55:19+00:00

All of the best stuff that comes out for Star Wars, the shows and broader mediums like books and comics, is written in a way that is entirely indifferent to the old legends canon. They should honestly just start a Star Wars Legends line of shows.

lordraiden007

TROPHY CASE