erik

Gallup finding all sorts of polling questions they can retire now. First Presidential approval ratings and now this.

The Military-Reddit Complex is an idea that would get you thrown out of Bladerunner 2099's writer's room for being too far-fetched and stupid and yet.

Black hole sun, won't you come...

I'm doing well at work and it's happening with me too, which feels super weird. I'm getting compliments about my last big win in completely unrelated email chains, getting nice spot bonuses and invited to thank you lunches. But at the same time, I'm being asked to do a lot more paper work that's mostly just copy-paste and other general busy work that feels like huge wastes of time related to like new SOPs and task tracking.

They are incapable of putting out a bad track.

Yeah, this comes from a weird place that like all franchises just deserve to live on forever or something. How many people are still talking about MASH, one of the most watched television shows of its time? Or more recently Twilight, which at one time redefined an entire literary genre and had the biggest films in the world, much like Harry Potter? Obviously, I don't discount at all Rowling's everything she's done to harm her brand thing here, but why is the baseline assumption that Harry Potter should live on forever? Media franchises come and go all the time.

Yeah, I can see wanting to call the bluff. The timing on this, with Chris suddenly getting them proper social media accounts elsewhere, strikes me more as Chapo wanting control of the biggest fan presence on Reddit (maybe on the internet?) than anything the Patreon overlords had to say.

But I get as just some unpaid reddit mod not wanting to tempt fate with legal actions directed toward you and just saying "fuck you I quit."

Minish Cap gets ignored too often when talking Zelda. Really, a lot of those installments on portable systems were quite charming.

DA2 is definitely a bit underrated both because of what you mentioned, the cultural bullshit was heating up and it landed right in it, but also the love affair gamers were having at the time with open worlds. Like you said, it's a little limited and repetitive in the level design, but the story is tight, it's cool to see choices and their effects years later and the characters are very well done. The ending, unfortunately, suffers from typical BioWare downfall where no matter what you do, you basically have to fight every boss because they'll all turn on you no matter who you ally yourself with. I definitely prefer it to Inquisition, which like you say, feels like an empty MMO, and Veilguard, which feels like it was written by Wattpad authors.

I really like the Paragon-Renegade in ME1 because it doesn't feel like good-evil like so many dialogue systems did in that time. You could definitely be a renegade and be more of a "we get the job done because the alternative is extinction" type of hero rather than just cartoonishly evil like you ended up in KoTOR for example. Sadly, the sequels basically took the easy way out and made Renegade kind of sadist and evil.

For me, this year I played a few games:

• Metaphor: ReFantazio - It was fine. I was hoping with the team behind Persona being free of Persona's focus on high school students, they could do something more mature and interesting. But no, even in a completely made up secondary world, we still are kids saving the universe or whatever. It's fine, but it really didn't feel that that much of a step forward. And the requirement to keep the Persona-like visual novel gameplay with epic fantasy's much bigger scope meant having to invent reasons your character can teleport and other things like that. It just really felt like a mess of different things crammed together. Only recommended for the biggest of Persona fans.

• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - This game ruled. Everyone that hyped this was correct. From the absolute gut punch of an opening, to the great, Mario RPG-like battle system to the character work (actual adults with actual adult feelings!), it just worked. Rare game that everyone talks about and they were right.

• Last Defense Academy - Guilty pleasure. Definitely nice to have Kodaka back in full sicko mode making a visual novel where nothing is sacred. The gameplay is fine, if you like tactics RPG battle systems, you'll find enough to enjoy here. What I found best about this was that almost every gameplay mechanic had in game lore and story attached to it. There's a tendency for mechanics and story to be a little separated (why doesn't Cloud just use a Phoenix Down?) in games, and this game is whip smart about how it makes the two meet. Seeing choices actually matter and all the branching paths to lead to all 100 endings was also well executed.

My kid enjoys it. Weird to release the last episode on Christmas when he's busy with gifts and family, but we'll get to it eventually. It seems to make less sense than even most Adventure Time stuff does (which we've watched all of it together because he's a fan of all of it), but it's certainly not bad by any stretch. Just occasionally more interested in some larger story beats and set pieces than it is in the connective tissue between them.

Some of the specific beats also seem to be done more to reference other works (the second to last episode had a bunch of Nausica of the Valley of the Wind, for example), than to make sense narratively, but there's still good character beats and it's saying some nice things anyway.

I'd rather have him into something like this than rotting his brain with YouTube or TikTok like some of his classmates definitely are. He's at the age where he's "learning" things from media and so things like Hunter not taking advantage of a tipsy Fionna are good for him to see. He also said out of no where "Huntress Wizard is cool. She's powerful and has cool abilities. I can see why Finn likes her." So, hopefully that means I don't have a manosphere dork on my hands haha