Isn’t that the one where you put it on and go “wait hang the fuck on, that’s Tasha Yar, this isn’t just surface level, someone spent a surprising amount of effort making this lore-compliant and accurate to the characters”?

Those are, in fact, perfectly sensible guidelines.

Ugh, what pathetic reporting, taking him at his word—that’s not what his own numbers say! It’s not agentic traffic, it’s just all bot traffic! And what’s the number-one cause of bot traffic right now?

AI scrapers, NOT agentic traffic!

They’re taking “wow, our scrapers are destroying the internet (see Anubis, “Stop Externalizing Your Costs Directly Into My Face”, etc) and spinning it into “wow, look how powerful agentic garbage is,” while carefully hiding the actual agentic numbers so they can pump this stupid bubble even more!

Lies, lies, lies, it’s all lies all the way down…

I mean, when I was reading the books as they came out, I expected “oh yeah obviously he’s gonna overturn the corrupt order and we’re gonna pay off on this whole elf slavery plot, which surely is written comedically just because an unflinching representation would be far too dark for a kids series.” That’s how stories like this usually end, after all.

And then, uh, it didn’t do any of that.

So I think it’s something like “it’s fairly generic, the other stories in this genre skew left, and nobody expected it to have a weird aggressively-centrist swerve a decade later.”

True, but my compiler isn’t demanding a $200/month subscription from me.

The article describes this too: healthy people balk at the high premiums, drop their insurance, the pool of people on insurance becomes proportionally more sick people who can’t risk dropping coverage, the insurance companies realize they’ll have to pay out more per person, premiums go up.

I mean, your job might be screwing you over regardless, but there are other explanations.

Ultimately, Star Wars is made by a lot of authors with a lot of different visions and external pressures. I’ve heard three main interpretations:

• Bringing balance to the Force means destroying the Sith, because darkness is inherently evil. Vader fulfills this by killing the Emperor and becoming redeemed in his last moments, “destroying” the last Sith. (Ignore the whole fleet of off-screen Sith retroactively placed there by Expanded Universe works.)
• Bringing balance to the Force means making the number of Jedi and Sith equal, and Vader fulfills this by killing hundreds of thousands of Jedi.
• Bringing balance to the Force means destroying the black-and-white view of Jedi and Sith, which definitely seems to be the position of the Bendu (an ancient loosely-all-knowing alien who shows up in a handful of episodes of Clone Wars, but has been treated by the broader franchise as disproportionately important). Vader fulfills this by breaking the boundary between Sith and Jedi in his dying moments—or maybe the prophecy was about Rey after all. (Doesn’t this make the shot of Luke’s face inside Vader’s helmet the most interesting? Almost as though it’s saying both “there is evil in you, but there is good in him too.”)

Which is “right”? Well, you’d have to ask Lucas, wouldn’t you? Or Rian Johnson, or Dave Filoni, or the entire writing team of Knights of the Old Republic, or any of the thousands of people who’ve written for Star Wars… There’s not just one answer.

I think any of these could be true, from a certain point of view.

This happened to a close friend of mine. He was already on the edge, with some weird opinions and beliefs… but he was talking with real people who could push back.

When he switched to spending basically every waking moment with an AI that could reinforce and iterate on his bizarre beliefs 24/7, he went completely off the deep end, fast and hard. We even had him briefly hospitalized and they shrugged, basically saying “nothing chemically wrong here, dude’s just weird.”

He and his chatbot are building a whole parallel universe, and we can’t get reality inside it.

Wii Fit Trainer’s dash attack.

Yeah. Honestly, it’s kinda funny—their sci-fi has a shaky grasp of science, their drama is tedious and annoying, the basic storytelling fundamentals are purely vibes-based and miss actually connecting setups to payoffs half the time… but every romantic episode has been at least okay, imo.

Unfortunately, that’s turned every character into this. Sigh…

Maybe this creative team would be better for The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

…Even leaving aside how your partner seems to communicate poorly then blame you for any misinterpretations without taking any responsibility for their own bad communication…

Why does your partner need you to be in bed before they can go to sleep? That’s really weird.

Like, you know how I handle this when I’m in your partner’s position? I say “cool, sounds fun, please do the dishes when you get in, I’ll probably be asleep by then.” If I wake up a little when they get in, I roll over and cuddle. Done.

It sounds almost like there’s another reason they want you home, that they don’t trust you or something.

goals tbh

absolutely fucking not

G

I don’t think the problem was the building.

Financially, I think the biggest problem was paying an entire cast of actors… AND an entire secondary backup cast backstage already in makeup and ready to swap in at a moment’s notice, because the breakneck pace meant you absolutely couldn’t afford to wait an hour for somebody to drive in.

Like, the limiting factor here isn’t that Disney couldn’t make a building big enough—it was that the whole design of “every guest should get enough face time with an actor character to feel like they’re a protagonist” just doesn’t scale well. Double the seats? Now you need twice the actors for the same amount of interaction, and that ratio means your overhead is going to be thin no matter what.

…I still wanna see somebody do this with a cruise ship, though. Just… if you’re also gonna make it a LARP, you’re gonna have to be more careful about the business implications of your narrative design.

Oh shit. I hope everyone makes it out okay…

And here I thought I was just being weirdly picky about this!

…Well, I mean, it’s still probably weirdly picky, but now I’m part of a tradition of being weirdly picky about it!

I love the style of the 3DS and Wii U menus. I certainly wouldn’t mind more fun elements like those, especially StreetPass—I loved StreetPass, though it’d be impractical on a device even bigger than the already not-pocket-sized Switch.

But try using them side by side, and it’s immediately obvious how sluggish and unresponsive those older consoles’ menus were. The 3DS’s OS feels to me like it’s constantly screaming in pain, barely able to run at all—moving between icons takes something like a half-second, switching modes takes three to five and a full loading screen…

I do miss the style, but I definitely wouldn’t want them to go that far in the opposite direction again. Just a little more flair and fun, maybe one gimmick.

Oh, there is DEFINITELY a point where too much cheese becomes a mistake. Somewhere around 400%, I think. I felt sick for days…

I was trying to come up with a way to use 3 to get through bank vault doors, but I like this. Any empty transparent box suddenly becomes a surveillance tool…