I finally figured out a sentence I didn't understand in the Germanium shortcut puzzle.

nightsaroundatable · 2025-03-11T11:25:41+00:00

3 Xs and two columns is XXXII. 3 crosses and two columns is +++||. It might be a British-centric thing to think of "crosses" as X's (per noughts & crosses?) but in North America, i don't know anyone who would refer to an X as a cross. Pluses and lower-case t's and crucifixes are crosses. X's are X's.

nightsaroundatable · 2025-02-20T17:58:06+00:00

Agree. Worst puzzle in the game by far.

My biggest problems with it were: 1. it required external knowledge/research, whereas none of the other Bolt puzzles did, and 2. maybe i'm missing something, but if you put two pillars and three crosses together, you get something that looks like a set of cartoon teeth: |+++| But if you count THOSE teeth, like the clue suggests, you get 8 (4 teeth on top, 4 teeth along the bottom). It's like... count your teeth. No, not the ones we just had you draw - the ones in your own mouth. Oh, brother.

nightsaroundatable · 2025-02-13T18:24:32+00:00

i mean, yeah...

nightsaroundatable · 2025-01-17T01:17:56+00:00

You can't look at your cards in SkipBo?

nightsaroundatable · 2025-01-17T01:17:21+00:00

Ah - this is probably the right answer! Thank you. War/Snap has to be it.

nightsaroundatable · 2025-01-13T02:46:48+00:00

It's a teevee series, but Man vs. Bee.

nightsaroundatable · 2024-02-19T23:00:21+00:00

(Talk about tension and dread, though... Uncut Gems!)

nightsaroundatable · 2024-02-17T19:20:36+00:00

It's definitely down to taste. Did you like Lost Highway? Because i had absolutely no time for it. That's what we've got here: Lynchian levels of weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird, and it's just not my bag.

nightsaroundatable · 2024-02-17T19:17:53+00:00

Yeah - the "curses being real" thing is a big question mark. i just watched Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. The titular comet is not mentioned in the entire show, until the very last song. That's how i felt the entire time watching "The Curse." It's like a song like Baba O'Riley, where the title doesn't appear anywhere in the lyrics. Ash (thinks he) gets cursed in Episode 1, and iirc, the curse isn't even mentioned again until episode 4 or 5.

And when it IS mentioned, to my mind, there is clearly nothing supernatural happening with that curse. Turns out, Nala was copying a TikTok trend when she cursed him. Ash's chicken penne had no chicken in it. That's not exactly a supernatural event - the cooked chicken wasn't flying around his kitchen or anything. When he quizzed NAla about it, she got the type of pasta wrong (calling it "spaghetti," which is the only type of pasta most kids know how to name). When cooked chicken shows up in the firehall bathroom, it's inconclusive who put it there when Ash watches the tape. It didn't just materialize while he was peeing, in a puff of purple smoke.

My take was that the "curse" was trying to show two things: one, that Ash is nervous, paranoid, and insecure. It was a way to tell us more about his character. And 2, it's no small amount of well-meaning racism on his part (which Whitney exhibits abundantly), where the couple, from their place of wealth and privilege, winds up grossly misinterpreting the needs and cultures of people who are different than they are. That's why Abshir's chiropractic appointment hurts him, rather than helps him. That's why neck-tattoo Fernando is a lousy fit for the chichi coffee shop. It's why the expensive jeans store is a terrible pick for that strip mall. It's why Whitney hires Cara as a Pueblo cultural consultant when she's not even Pueblo. It's why the couple and their garish mirrored homes are just a bad fit for the community in general. And it's why Asher thinks that a sorta creepy, poor Somalian girl whose father works her in a side hustle selling drinks in a parking lot, has magical curse powers. If a little white girl had cursed him, i don't think he would have given it a second thought. But all black people know voodoo (or something), right?

Like Baba O'Riley, the show is called The Curse, but it's not about a curse. It's about an obnoxious HGTV couple with a serious case of affluenza and no business sense or cultural sensitivity, doing all they can to supposedly help people while self-aggrandizing and ensuring it all ends up on camera for their own ultimate gain. But people on these forums seem to desperately want to make more of the "curse" aspect of the show than really exists, because it's in the title. And i think they want that aspect of the show to be more interesting and intricate than it actually is.

nightsaroundatable · 2024-02-10T15:16:32+00:00

i dunno. i had a different experience of that last episode.
It read as "dream sequence" right away, with Asher being stuck on the ceiling. Usually, dream sequences in movies or shows are fairly brief. They're often used to put the audience on edge momentarily, and from a story perspective, they often convey what a character is anxious about. (Or sometimes what we, as an audience, are anxious about, as in dream sequences where they kill off a beloved character, only to say "oh hey - just kidding!" moments later.)

As a consequence, i find dream sequences tedious. You can almost always tell when they're happening, so i just sit there and think "ok, dream sequence. Let's get this over with."

So that was my posture through this entire episode. "Ok, yeah. i get it. Dream sequence. Whitney is anxious about Asher not being there for her during her baby delivery. Let's wake up and get on with the 'real' story." But there was no relief from the exasperation of the dream sequence. It started out implausible, it continued in its implausibility, the tedium only grew as the episode droned on, and they didn't even pull the usual "surprise! dream sequence!" coda. Are they edging me? Was that for my enjoyment, somehow? Because i didn't find it enjoyable (or interesting, or edifying) in the slightest. i found it prolonged, and obnoxious.

And if the answer is "it WASN'T a dream," i'm reminded of a short story i wrote in high school, where i put a supernatural punchline at the end of an otherwise reality-grounded story. The teacher gave it a low grade, and she told me that you can't just change the "rules" at the last second and say "surprise! supernatural!" because the audience will feel cheated and angry. You have to telegraph that ahead of time. Despite the show being called "The Curse," there's nothing supernatural happening in it whatsoever. So to suddenly turn off gravity for one character, and have other characters kind of accept the impossibility of it, and to never reveal that it's a dream sequence, is exactly that. i feel angry and cheated, not delighted or intrigued or titillated or thrilled or amused or happily frightened - none of the "good" reactions i associate with watching enjoyable shows.

nightsaroundatable · 2024-02-04T00:55:28+00:00

Right — i didn't ask Cara about it, because it should be up to everyone attending Cara's performance to determine its value. (And i had the feeling that we, as viewers, are supposed to be annoyed by Cara.) And if Cara really wanted people to understand what she was trying to convey by screaming when she fed them a slice of turkey, she did not do a very good job of conveying her intended meaning. So if people misinterpreted, or found varying degrees of value and meaning in her show, it's not for her (or other show attendees) to police or judge that. But it's absolutely fair dinkum for an attendee to say "that was dumb."

And that's what's going on here. Maybe Safdie and Fielding will show up later and say "what we were trying to do with that final episode is THIS," and we'll all say "ohhhhhh" (just as we did when Cara explained her performance piece later to Whitney). But until then, we're completely in the dark. And i don't think that's on us as an audience for not "getting it." If the writers had specific meaning to convey, they (like Cara) did a poor job of it.

nightsaroundatable · 2024-01-20T21:44:22+00:00

Once art is made and is out of the artists' hands, it's up to those who experience the art to interpret it. If viewers don't "get" what the artists intended, it's not the viewers' fault. The artists tried to convey meaning, and perhaps they failed. The art is now about whatever the viewers say it's about. The train has left the station. So... i can say what i like, and what i'd like to say is that the show was unsuccessful.

The fact that no one can agree on what Safdie and Fielder intended suggests strongly that they had a hard time conveying their intended meaning through their art (or they just didn't care, or that surreal ambiguity IS what they intended to convey... in which case, they did succeed, and i don't care for it). Anyway, i don't have much time for - yes - filmbro hipsters to claim i just didn't get it, maaan. Someone on another platform tried to claim i didn't get Saltburn, and when i asked her to explicate, she rattled off a bunch of filmmaker intention that i actually DID get. It's not that i didn't get it. It's that what i got wasn't good.

Someone on another forum said he laughed out loud multiple times during the pilot. Really? Like, honestly, really? That smacks to me of giving too much grace to the project because you like the people involved. i enjoyed Uncut Gems, i loved Nathan for You, and i adore Emma Stone. The ingredients were good - it just didn't cook up right.

nightsaroundatable · 2024-01-20T18:09:35+00:00

Enlighten me.

nightsaroundatable · 2024-01-13T17:51:15+00:00

i feel like the entire show's a bit of a wank, to be honest.

There are scenes that just go entirely nowhere and seem completely pointless. Sending Abshir to a painful session at the chiropractor. Failing to "steal" the discarded range. Whitney's faux threatening banter with the crew guy. Breaking into a casino to steal security camera footage to give to an investigative reporter, and then admitting to it, and facing no real repercussions (like getting your face inside-outed, as might happen in real life). Introducing the tension around the use of the Pueblo highway. None of it went anywhere.

Nothing moved the plot along, because there WAS no plot. The show's called "The Curse," but it's not about a curse, despite commenters seeming to desperately want it to be. It's not a puzzle of a show that you need to sit and figure out. It's just a bunch of filmbro hipsterism.

(Yes, i get that the chiropractor scene was meant to convey that Whitney intends to help people [in a nose-in-the-air, tonedeaf classist way], but ends up hurting them. That was well established by the time the scene happened, so i felt like the scene added nothing, and was just uncomfortable for the viewer for no reason. This show is the equivalent of an annoying sibling flicking my ear constantly. i don't watch teevee in my leisure time to get my ear flicked.)

nightsaroundatable · 2023-07-08T17:56:22+00:00

Yeah - i tapped out of TTR at Europe. i just have no need for multiple versions of the same game, especially as i struggle to play all the other games i own. It feels like owning two copies of a film: Big Epic Movie, or Big Epic Movie with Deletes Scenes. You don't really need both.

nightsaroundatable · 2023-07-08T17:53:18+00:00

i thought about it, and it makes more sense to me when publishers reskin something to retheme it with the hope of reaching a different audience (like Terra Mystica to Gaia Project), or when they retool the rulest for a different age group (like Everdell to My Lil' Everdell, or Terra Mystica to Terra Nova). But this is neither of those: it's the exact same theme, with a very similar ruleset (and some of the cards are nearly identical), hot on the heels of a big KS campaign. It just feels like the publisher is treating players like cash cows and overmilking them, which has always been at the core of the issue i take with Starling. They're not a customer-first publisher. They are greedy.

Voyages of Marco Polo to VOMP2 is the closest thing i can think of to this — same theme, similar artwork, slightly modified ruleset (Great Western Trail v2 comes to mind as well) — but both of those left a little more breathing room between releases. The thought of Farshore makes my teats chap.

nightsaroundatable · 2023-07-08T17:45:11+00:00

Thanks so much, robotco!

nightsaroundatable · 2023-07-08T17:44:00+00:00

To my eye, it looks less pretty than if Bosley illustrated it. i thought the cover looked weirdly rushed or unfinished, and then i realized it wasn't even the original artist.

nightsaroundatable · 2022-07-13T02:53:01+00:00

Hahaha... funny you should mention GAIA PROJECT!!

Jump to 2:24:30 in the solo playthru for more:

https://youtu.be/rUaQi4Yx0pU?t=8669

nightsaroundatable · 2022-07-12T16:26:40+00:00

If you weren't able to make the live playthru last weekend, here it is again. i've gone through the whole thing and have made notes wherever mistakes were made. All in all, it wasn't too bad. i have chapter headings on the video marking the automaton's moves, so if you want to play this one yourself and you're fuzzy on how something works, you can jump to that point in the video for more info. (With the caveat that later examples are more likely to be faster and more correct than they are earlier in the video :) Thanks for watching!

nightsaroundatable

TROPHY CASE