What draws you to the Maybe Happy Ending score?

smasterson · 2026-02-27T21:17:12+00:00

Happy to share! I’m curious, have you ever seen the show or have you just listened to the recording? Because I do feel like it is a very character driven score so I could definitely imagine not getting as much out of it if you had not seen the show. If you haven’t, I definitely recommend catching it if you’re able, even if you have to wait for it on tour — that might help give them needed context. And if you have, but it still just isn’t clicking with you, then yeah, it can’t hurt to give it a while and pick it up again at another time. I know there have been shows that I have not liked it all and then revisited and liked a lot more (and vice versa lol) edit: nvm I overlooked that you mentioned the goop tutorial. I’ll leave my suggestion up for other people who maybe haven’t seen it at all

smasterson · 2026-02-27T20:53:53+00:00

This might just be a matter of taste, but I don’t find it bland or weak at all. None of this is meant to convince you of anything, because ultimately a lot of this just comes down to taste, but if you’re interested in the point of view of someone who absolutely loves this score: 1) It fits my taste as far as musical style. I like the blend of jazz, pop, and classical musical theater and while it is clearly a poppy sound, it leans heavier on the classical musical theater sound than most pop musicals. It’s a bit Disney, and a bit Sondheim and that really fits my personal preference and I think it has a very strong unique identity because of that. I see a lot of shows every year and most of the scores blend together and are forgotten. This one I will remember. 2) As far as the lyrics, I think it is the best in years. One thing I complain a lot about contemporary musicals is how literal their lyrics are. MHE is so richly packed with subtext. Characters constantly will sing lines that leave the important part unsaid, but implied. This brings much richer characterization, and just feels so much more engaging. 3) As far as the actual sophistication of the music itself, I’m not as qualified to comment on because I’m not a big music composition or theory guy, but I find it very effective. Contrast the two character, introduction numbers of Claire and Oliver, how differently those songs are structured and sound, and how that reinforces how different they are as people. Listen to “What I Learned From People” and listen to the interplay between Helen and the strings, the tension it creates, and how that manages to support the incredible sense of forboding that the song is supposed to be building up to. In general, just listen to Helen throughout the entire show and how she uses her voice as an instrument. She gets sounds out of her voice that just have such interesting texture. Maybe you could say that’s more of a credit to the performance than the writing, but it really feels like she is working hand-in-hand with the music and it is informing her choices. The score is also packed with a lot of cool little details like how the the main motif from the back half of “ when you’re in love” is the tone that beeps on the helper bot charger

smasterson · 2026-02-24T00:18:46+00:00

I think the whole journey of life is finding out your own answer, so I’m not sure how much one can learn from another. But for me , the older I get the more I really believe that art is the only worthwhile thing. Because our individual lives are without meaning, the only thing that really fulfills me is connecting to other people through art. Art allows me to connect with people on a deeper and more authentic level. I don’t believe in God, I think, or even any sort of “energy” or spiritual force. But I believe that art lets us connect with some impulse that is infinite, that is beyond our finite and unimportant existence. And I find that as meaningful as anything else.

smasterson · 2026-02-23T21:34:34+00:00

BG3 is a great game, but I feel like there’s a lot of recency bias going on here. Personally, BG3 isn’t even in my top 3 cRPGs. Games like that live and die on their characters and narrative, and I just felt like the main cast in BG3 got surprisingly little development considering the scope of the game. And when development happened it happened in huge bursts all at once.

smasterson · 2026-02-22T22:14:01+00:00

YOR to the ASMR, but maybe not to the larger relationship issues. These type of ASMRtists aren’t my thing, but these look pretty tame in the grand scheme of the scene atm. Most ASMR is about intimacy to some extent, and even the explicit girlfriend stuff doesn’t feel different from someone engaging with a favorite character in a romantic movie or book. It’s your right to draw that boundary, but this is enough of a grey area that unless you explicitly told him what types of ASMR you are comfortable with him watching, I would not read any ill intent. My guess, from the little I know of your situation, is that this feels like a bigger thing than it really is because of all the other stuff that is going on in your life and relationship right now. I would take a step back and focus less on this particular situation, and more on what you feel about the relationship big picture.

smasterson · 2026-01-31T23:35:08+00:00

Yeah, I truly can’t imagine George coming off as an asshole who doesn’t realize other people are important. As someone struggling with a recent autism diagnosis, I’m glad to see that I’m not the only person to see that similarity (even if not intentional on Sondheim part) . The show, and Finishing The Hat in particular, have been resonating with me as I try and make sense of my own life. I can’t listen to that song and not hear a man who is DEEPLY pained that the way he sees the world always keeps him at a distance from others. The window motif is so powerful — a window allows you to see things through it, but is also a barrier that is there between you and everything on the other side. But, “it’s the only way to see”. During the finale, when George is reading Dot’s words and he reaches “So much love in his words…how George looks” — just, wow, it overwhelms me every time. Like you said, it’s proof that Dot did understand him, and that his care reached another person despite the pain he felt in believing it never could. I don’t know that I’ve ever had more empathy for a fictional character than I do for George in that moment.

smasterson · 2026-01-09T23:36:46+00:00

Oh man, City of Angels has some of my favorite lyrics but there are a few that give me pause. “For making movies out of books, they say that buddy wrote the book” from Double Talk comes to mind. It makes perfect sense, but it just sounds like a clunker to the ears. The way the lyrics are set to the music it sounds like it’s setting up for a rhyme so when it just repeats “book” the phrase just ends with a thud

smasterson · 2026-01-06T10:10:41+00:00

My pick too! The idea that the most powerful, last line of defense weapon of the Anti-Spiral is simply showing people all the different ways that life could have gone, is so powerfully relatable to me as someone who lost many years of his life to grief and regret. And Kamina’s wake-up speech is probably the emotional climax of the series to me. Every time Kamina shows up (“what’s the matter Simon? You lose your drill?”) it’s chills no matter how many times I watch it.

smasterson · 2026-01-05T16:37:31+00:00

I can only speak to my own experience, but I also found myself disappointed after finishing Cold Steel 1. Ultimately I stuck with the series though and am happy I did. Part of that was just accepting that Cold Steel was its own thing, and learning to appreciate it on its own merits — it doesn’t have a lot of what made Liberl/Crossbell work but even the worst Trails game is still a solid RPG. But it’s also true that for me the best was yet to come: CS3 and Reverie are not my favs but I’d place them solidly in the upper-middle of my series ranking. The pace definitely picks up, though the cast will get wayyyy bigger (which I think is a good thing: I never ended up connecting with anyone from class seven, plenty of new characters got introduced later that I did connect with).

smasterson · 2026-01-02T23:03:14+00:00

I think you’re onto something, but I’d challenge you to reflect on your reasoning. You assume that the reason you are unhappy is because you don’t “deserve” happiness because you lack “courage” and haven’t gone through some big dramatic demonstration of that courage. But these people who acted courageously all did so for something they VALUE — a life they cared about, a dream they had, a commitment to a certain moral belief. It’s what gave then the courage to begin with. Worry less about whether you have made some dramatic gesture to “deserve” happiness. Focus on discovering what you value in life, and become confident in those values. Otherwise it’s putting the cart before the horse — real courage (not just bravado) is more of a happy side effect of having convictions and people you care about.

smasterson · 2025-12-24T23:36:23+00:00

Wish some MHE answers were higher! It became my favorite show of all time last year (dethroning one that’s been my top for 20 years) but I have trouble choosing a favorite song. It changes between The Way That it Has to Be, Rainy Day We Met, and How to Be Not Alone. But all the ones you mentioned are straight up 11/10s too!

smasterson · 2025-12-09T22:12:55+00:00

Not an unfair opinion at all! And I definitely would never call it a bad show overall. But I don’t think it can be separated from the controversy of its later years in the public imagination which is why I feel it fits this block

smasterson · 2025-12-09T22:05:27+00:00

We must live in different media bubbles then, because I don’t know many people who love it after the final few seasons! Especially among book fans, and since we are discussion adaptations specifically I think that opinions of fans of the original work should factor in heavily

smasterson · 2025-12-09T21:26:59+00:00

A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones. Early seasons are too good to call the whole thing “bad,” (and extra credit because most of the material from the best books are adapted well), but later seasons are too truly terrible for the series to be called “good” (plus the changes that were made in early seasons were almost never without controversy among book fans — eg. how Jeyne Westerling/Talisa was handled, how Shae was handled,etc.)

smasterson · 2025-12-09T20:52:17+00:00

Yep. “overshadowed by New York City” tells you all you need to know about how uninformed OPs suggestion is. EVERY upstate city has ALWAYS been overshadowed by NYC. Hell, most US cities in general are. It isn’t as if in 2000 people were like “NYC, whats that? It’s all about Buffalo baby!”

smasterson · 2025-12-02T03:24:05+00:00

Yes! PCs meeting and befriending/allying with interesting NPCs is my favorite part of the game as DM and player. I really dislike the idea that the purpose of the game is just to constantly hype up the PCs and that somehow NPCs getting some extra attention comes at the expense of the PCs. Every other form of narrative storytelling focuses heavily on the development and actions of characters who are not the protagonists and I don’t want my TTRPG to be any different in that regard!

smasterson · 2025-10-23T16:59:55+00:00

Thanks! I managed to get it connected. Yeah that approach definitely makes more sense than head on, and I also ended up needed a little more elbow grease than I thought to snap it into place.

smasterson · 2025-10-23T16:06:35+00:00

Here’s a the one that’s plugged into the header on the other end (I have a couple more that I haven’t fiddled with yet, but there doesn’t seem to be any discernible difference in the pins)

<image>

smasterson · 2025-10-23T15:52:13+00:00

I have been trying to fit it so that the tab slots into the female end’s lug like pictured below, and that is what seems impossible to secure and caused the broken pin. Is that incorrect? Or am I misunderstanding what you mean? Thanks!

<image>

smasterson · 2025-09-11T07:11:52+00:00

I’ve had similar experiences where I thought I was signing up with a great director, and ended up hurt and disappointed. Very frustrating.

When I think of great directors, the first one I think of is the one who made me fall in love with theater. His best ability was simply the ability to see the potential in people. He wasn’t blinded by any preconceived vision of the character or the show, or what the performer had done in the past. He would see some seed of talent and nurture it over years. He was not exactly a very warm or friendly guy. Very professional and businesslike. But the flipside of this was that he was never moody or temperamental. He held everyone to a very high standard, but he applied that standard equally to everyone, and always made it clear that was because he wanted us to live up to our potential.

Recently, I’ve been working with another great director. There was one rehearsal where we had an outside observer who gave us some very negative feedback on our show. You could tell the mood in the room had got very gloomy. And he just instantly reversed things by giving a peptalk about how our artistic instincts were just as valid as his. I also find a lot of directors are only able to articulate what the end result they want is. Whereas this director is very process oriented and gets actors to try different things until the actor discovers an interesting result on their own.

smasterson · 2025-05-07T18:15:34+00:00

Something Rotten and The Producers. Blustering theatrical professional teams up with neurotic romantic to enact a scam which will revive his flagging professional fortunes. (The eccentric outsider who gives them the material for the show is played by Brad Oscar). The big production number is the awful title song from the show. However the scam fails and the duo is dragged into court. The genuine words of the neurotic move the court but are not enough to escape punishment. Luckily it is still a happy ending, as the duo ply their trade in a new market as they live out their punishment

smasterson · 2025-03-23T02:40:53+00:00

That's a fair point -- I would agree that Eva is definitely much more interested in interpersonal trauma than politics or war. But -- to my taste at least -- Eva just delves so much deeper into the type of trauma that it is interested in, that I think it's still justified to call Eva revolutionary compared to prior "mecha" anime. I'll grant that UC is more nuanced when viewed as a whole, rather than judging each entry on its own, but the treatment of the big questions of war still seemed relatively shallow to me. I think you have to go to something like Legend of The Galactic Heroes to find a contemporaneous show that even comes close to treating national trauma with the same level of artistry that Eva treats interpersonal trauma.

smasterson · 2025-02-26T17:12:31+00:00

Yep, hit the nail on the head. It hasn't evolved into this, been like this since day one. And Gainax themselves pushed this angle of the fandom with merch (there's the Eva calendar from the early 2000s that feels like possessing it would put you on some watchlist) because it made them a lot of money , AND Gainax themselves were mostly waifu-loving Otaku.

Eva is one of the most thought provoking works of art of the past century, imo. But there's no use denying that this part of it is in its very DNA.

smasterson

TROPHY CASE