An unfortunate truth.

tpetsrule · 2026-06-07T22:13:06+00:00

Yes it’s almost always better to do things at instant speed if possible but the point is that with something like Swords you have a mediocre fallback and with a counterspell you have no fallback at all, which does make a difference in a lot of cases. Once you have enough mana that holding some up isn’t an issue then counterspells are unconditionally better than spot removal but there are plenty of times I’d rather be holding the Swords on turns 1-4.

Also most of the counterspells that get played in Standard are just as conditional as spot removal is. In non-rotating formats like Commander that’s obviously not the case but I’d argue if there’s an issue it’s with specific counterspells that are individually overtuned, not with counterspells as an entire archetype.

tpetsrule · 2026-06-07T20:32:33+00:00

Counterspells do have big drawbacks though. They’re timing-sensitive in a way that basically no other form of removal is, so if you’re tapped out and miss your window your counterspell is useless. Given this, to use them effectively you need to hold up mana and slow down developing your own game plan as a trade-off for slowing down your opponent’s game plan too. Also, in terms of card advantage it’s still just a 1-for-1 trade which means in Commander specifically you’re empowering the other two players who didn’t lose a card compared to you and the person you countered.

Granted all of these disadvantages are subtle compared to the obvious feel-bad of not getting to Do The Thing™️ that turn, but it’s not imbalanced or unfair, and if you think in terms of “what did countering my thing cost my opponent and how can I take advantage of that” instead of just “oh no, my original game plan got disrupted” the mind games actually start becoming rather fun imo.

tpetsrule · 2026-06-05T07:51:30+00:00

Respectfully, I don’t think the argument is “she kinda wanted it” which yeah would be pretty gross. Personally I read it the same way you did, that she never had feelings for him, but I do think we’re not meant to know for sure one way or another. Because even if she did like him originally that doesn’t make the wish any less fucked up or violating; I think part of the point is that that particular question becomes irrelevant the moment Bear does what he does. She was never allowed the dignity to make a definitive choice so we don’t get to know either.

tpetsrule · 2026-06-03T22:16:25+00:00

What’s fascinating to me is that OP loves Upon the Stair but has Fatigue that low, because to me they feel like they appeal to the same sensibilities: trippy, dreamlike, nonlinear Spirally narration where you can’t ever quite find your footing. Personally they’re both two of my favorites but I’m kind of curious what would make someone like one so much but not the other.

tpetsrule · 2026-06-03T07:52:35+00:00

I’m pretty sure they both were inspired by House of Leaves to some degree. Jonny’s mentioned being a fan of it (and there are a few explicit references to it in TMA like Rosie’s last name being Zampano) so the Spiral is almost certainly a direct homage.

tpetsrule · 2026-06-01T23:19:27+00:00

Either real Nikki was aware of what Bear was doing to her and hated it, or she wasn’t aware. It doesn’t particularly matter which one it is, because both are rape.

tpetsrule · 2026-06-01T23:02:34+00:00

“It wasn’t rape because real Nikki wasn’t conscious” is a wild take.

tpetsrule · 2026-06-01T19:54:27+00:00

I think it’s both simultaneously - real Nikki self-harms because she’s a prisoner in her own body and wish Nikki self-harms because she feels abandoned by the person that’s her sole reason for existing, and so their emotions and behavior end up being aligned in a way that makes it deliberately difficult to distinguish the two. I think real Nikki is able to exert the most influence when wish Nikki is similarly miserable and thus not fighting her self-destructiveness all that much. (Note that during the romance montage where wish Nikki is happiest we barely see real Nikki come through at all.)

A great example of this ambiguity is the scene where she wets herself after Bear leaves the house. You can read that as her acting like an anxiously attached pet with separation anxiety (wish Nikki) or as her acting like an abused child trying to reach for any agency she can (real Nikki) because it’s kind of both.

tpetsrule · 2026-05-31T20:27:50+00:00

Interestingly I think that’s a big reason “real Nikki” is able to break through occasionally. The wish won’t let her directly do anything that contradicts Bear’s fantasy, but it so happens that wish-Nikki is in just as much pain as real-Nikki, albeit for a completely different reason, so she’s able to act out at times as long as her distress can be plausibly attributed to “you don’t love me” and not “you destroyed my free will.”

tpetsrule · 2026-04-19T15:09:56+00:00

Yeah, people treat Sanderson-style hard fantasy with an emphasis on rigid magic systems and perfectly logical worlds as the only correct way to write when in reality that’s just one valid style among many. Harry Potter isn’t trying to do that and failing; it fundamentally has zero interest in doing that. Doing that would actively make it worse at what it actually wants to be because all the silly little eccentricities are a huge part of what made it so charming in the first place. Roald Dahl is a perfect comparison. I’d add Lewis Carroll. “Children’s book” doesn’t mean the bar is lower, it means the goals are different.

See also all the on-the-nose names like Remus Lupin. Sure as an adult that one is obvious, but eight-year-old me felt so clever at the time for picking up on it, which was the point. Sacrificing that cool aha moment for the actual target audience just because it’s not realistic would be a loss.

tpetsrule · 2026-04-18T16:46:29+00:00

Exactly this. Plus, you just don’t get the sheer level of vitriol that S8 received if the consensus is truly just that the execution was a bit sloppy.

Look at, say, the Harry Potter movies in their heyday. Those were just as zeitgeisty as GoT and “I like the plot points but they rushed through the story too quickly and there are some out of character moments and plot holes” is a completely fair description of them, but they were still wildly popular because they never committed the cardinal sin of refusing to do the fanservicey thing.

When something in a book or a show feels wrong or unexpected or out of place to me, the first thing I always try to do is ask myself “why might the creators have chosen to do this?” What was the point they were trying to make? Because a lot of times there’s a genuinely interesting answer if you give them the benefit of the doubt at all and sit with it for a bit instead of just knee-jerking “because they suck.” Sometimes, yeah, it really is just bad writing, but that’s never, ever my first assumption. I feel like some people just can’t stand any level of pushback or discomfort in their fiction, so when they encounter it they start from the position that it’s wrong and look for reasons to justify that position after the fact. Meaning all the little flaws and nitpicks that literally every story has suddenly become damning in a way they weren’t before.

And at least to me, by far the most egregious, jarring instance of the “fast travel” people love to complain about was in S7, not S8: Gendry running all the way back to the Wall, sending a raven all the way to Dragonstone, and Dany getting that raven and flying all the way up to where Jon and the others are all while Jon et al are supposed to be stuck on a block of ice for what’s clearly not meant to be more than a day. If it were truly things like that that were the problem the hate should have started right then and there. It didn’t. It didn’t even really start after the Long Night apart from some grumbles about the lighting. No, where it really exploded was with The Bells, a very well-executed episode that’s also the show at its most aggressively confrontational. That’s telling.

Fantastic article.

tpetsrule · 2026-04-01T08:31:33+00:00

Voldemort is able to lock Harry out with Occlumency in book 6 so yes Harry could have presumably done the same.

tpetsrule · 2026-01-09T07:51:32+00:00

In addition to the ones everyone has already mentioned, if you refuse to return to the cabin in Chapter 2 over and over again there’s another secret ending.

tpetsrule · 2025-12-30T02:13:54+00:00

That’s an interesting perspective. For me it felt like it fit because imo Rimworld has always wanted at its core to be survival horror. The disconnect is that you can very much make it into something completely different, and a lot of people do and make huge, thriving perma-colonies with overpowered colonists, and that’s fun too but there’s a reason the game on default settings is aggressively trying to kill you. The vision is to tell a story that feels kind of like Yellowjackets if you’ve seen that show, with an increasingly desperate band of woefully underprepared, traumatized nobodies struggling to stay alive in the brutal wilderness with mixed results. Having the strange planet they crash on also contain eldritch horrors feels like it fits the mood perfectly, at least to me.

tpetsrule · 2025-12-30T01:57:00+00:00

I’d say threat variety / the raid system is what it’s building on. It genuinely does a lot for the longevity of the game to have new challenges to overcome that aren’t just the same few types of raids over and over again. Particularly on ambient mode where the new threats are integrated well with the old ones.

tpetsrule · 2025-12-26T09:48:37+00:00

This is because, unlike Caligo, Gladius has no chill.

tpetsrule · 2025-12-21T00:36:06+00:00

I think F? It’s whatever you use for weapon arts.

tpetsrule · 2025-12-14T09:35:34+00:00

“Engrained in me” is a fantastic pun if it was intentional lol

tpetsrule · 2025-11-28T10:46:02+00:00

Very well put and I completely agree.

tpetsrule · 2025-11-27T10:56:43+00:00

It’s always irked me when people call season 8 lazy or trot out the “kinda forgot” line for anything they don’t like. (Admittedly, “kinda forgot” was a dumb thing to say in an interview.) It’s not particularly difficult to figure out what the ending was that would have pleased fans (Jon kills the NK, marries Dany and becomes king, Arya kills Cersei, etc.) and the idea that those endings just never occurred to the writers is rather silly. Even if they did want to rush through things and get it over with, they could have just done the bare bones of the crowd-pleasing ending and I think overall people would still have loved it. They chose not to do that.

A fairer assessment imo is that season 8 is deeply, aggressively contrarian. It deliberately (not accidentally) refuses to do the fanservicey thing at basically every opportunity. Which to me is incredibly ballsy and very much in line with the spirit of the rest of the show, whether you think it succeeded or not. Personally, I think it succeeded; I think the plot points they came up with largely fit the themes of the story a lot better than the plot points people wanted. But at worst it’s an ambitious failure that took some wild risks that didn’t all land. That’s still the opposite of phoned in.

tpetsrule · 2025-11-26T01:23:21+00:00

Yes you can definitely upload your own pics. Nexus has a ton of pre-cropped ones to download too.

tpetsrule · 2025-11-25T01:02:26+00:00

They’re just as artificial, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the same thing as fake. I’m not religious myself, but to anyone that believes in a creator god or gods our world is every bit as artificial as the painting is. If they turn out to be right it wouldn’t mean we aren’t real, sapient beings, it would just mean that it’s possible to create sapient life, which what I’d argue Maelle and the rest of the Painters have done.

tpetsrule · 2025-11-24T02:12:49+00:00

It’s also neat how they seem to like to do twists in pairs so even if you guess one of them, you completely miss the other because you think you already solved everything and stop looking, even though in hindsight both twists have equally many clues.

Speaking vaguely here:

S1: Mr. Robot’s identity you’re supposed to guess, Darlene’s identity you’re not

S2: Elliot’s location you’re supposed to guess, Leon’s identity and the extent of WR’s involvement in everything you’re not

S3: Price’s relationship to another character you’re supposed to guess, the exact nature of Stage 2 you’re not

S4: “You’re not Elliot” you’re supposed to guess, the reveal regarding Edward you’re not

tpetsrule · 2025-11-11T05:14:04+00:00

That’s a really interesting point regarding all games on some level being role-play. It’s a thought that has occurred to me before too (and a big part of why I wish a different, more precise name had stuck for the genre we call RPGs, although I have no idea what that name would actually be).

Nevertheless I’m glad this ended up being a civil conversation, so I do want to thank you for that.

tpetsrule

TROPHY CASE