“I tried to find out who was playing Baldur’s Gate 3, but all I found was this worthless pile of sexual abuse evidence!” [Throws cardboard box into incinerator]

Sword fight? Fanning at each other, crossing and smacking swords. Maybe even walking around each other. I don’t think that’s how a real sword fight would look.

Akira fucking Kurosawa, on the other hand…

The Protagonist Throw!

Notably, the Terminator never lays a finger on Sarah Connor in the first Terminator movie, because Cameron knew that if the perfect killing machine got its hands on its target, it would just kill her immediately and that would be the end of the movie.

Or tossing an entire Zippo lighter into a pool of gasoline. Do you have any idea how much a good Zippo costs?!

In Robocop when Murphy gets shot to pieces and wheeled into the ER, Verhoeven got real ER doctors to play the scene, so their chatter is very realistic and very nonchalant as they work on a guy that they know full-well is a lost cause.

I think in Event Horizon they tell the guy about to get airlocked to take deep breaths and then let all the air out of his lungs… which I think is accurate if you want to live as long as possible in vacuum. But then he gets horribly disfigured by the decompression, so they might have only got some points for accuracy.

There was an analysis of Nolan and post-Nolan Batman that argued that once you strip away all the fantastic parts of Batman, all the Clayfaces and Mr. Freezes and Poison Ivies and the sentient robots and uncanny weirdness, all that is left is a bunch of problems that frankly the cops should be able to handle, and that Batman at that point is just a cop who is willing to violate people’s Constitutional rights.

If Batman can be replaced by a well-outfitted SWAT team, then you’re not writing Batman well enough. Give him some insane nonsense that cops are not equipped to handle.

Hell, in Star Trek VI, where the Praxis Effect originates, it’s a horrifying industrial accident that blows up Praxis, so for all we know there might well have been some kind of moon-sized particle accelerator that blew up and did cause that ring shape. But it seems to show up in a lot of places where there’s not as justifiable an excuse.

I was in a play once where we were going to fire a blank onstage, in a fairly small black box theatre. There were two options, a .22 and a .45 caliber blank. The .22 made a sharp CRACK that really shocked you. The .45 made a VWOOM sound that filled up the entire room and left you with the feeling of a wave of violent energy having just passed through your entire body.

We went with the .22.

Ahem

Surely the internet will not be weird about this. Surely no degeneracy will commence.

I shit you not, I once watched a lady talking to the information desk at an art museum about a membership with a toddler. The kid started getting antsy, and didn’t listen after she told them to stop trying to run away. She had the kid lay down on their stomach, and she very gently put her foot on the kid’s back, so she was in effect halfway standing on them. The kid didn’t even seem upset, just “This is what happens when I don’t listen.” Awe inspiring.

Yeah, not getting what they want might mess up a kid’s afternoon. Being taught that throwing tantrums can get them what they want might mess a kid up for their entire life.

Nothing should! Parenting is hard fucking work, and if you’re not one hundred percent up for it, then don’t do it!

Even in some fantasy ideal world where pregnancy and childbirth are easy, preschool is free, and the future isn’t somewhere between bleak and horrifying… being a parent is still an incredibly taxing ordeal, mentally, physically, and emotionally. There are plenty of kids in the world. Nobody should get born to parents that feel even the slightest bit of reluctance at their existence.

Unless the local is me. I am terrible at giving directions. “Go that way for like, three… maybe four intersections. Turn left when there’s like a store or something on the side of the road. When it seems like the right time, turn left again, and then like… uh… there’s a tree… You know what, let me just give you the address and hope that GPS works out for you.”

For the record, we do and have done all of those things. This isn’t a story about my dog getting aggressive with the cats. If anything, we need to make a point of keeping the cats out of her food bowl because she will let them take her food away, all the while looking at us to please do something. It’s just that she seems to sometimes get ambivalent about whether she is in fact hungry or not… but that ambiguity immediately disappears if a cat comes over and sniffs her bowl.

With as much as they talked about the irrevocable destruction of the global ecosystem coming up in a matter of months, and then the constantly rotating day-night cycle, I imagine it would be possible to find out if your in-game time played actually was more or less than that deadline. It would be hilarious if the world was going to end in six months but then the math showed that you actually spent more than a year running around shooting the fins off of robo-pterodactyls.

I’ll be honest, I played through HZD and liked it a lot, but I came away with a list of minor improvements that could have made the game better.

If anything, Forbidden West had all of those same problems and more, and it had a less interesting story. Just to talk about the quests, for instance, I found myself running in boring laps trying to get a particular resource to upgrade a particular weapon, repeating the same battle so many times that it became truly tiresome.

Then I finally upgraded the weapon… and found that by the end of the story I had a bunch of incompletely-upgraded weapons and armor that nevertheless left me so overpowered that the final boss fight was hilariously trivial. If I’d invested the enormous amount of grind to actually max out all the top-tier equipment, then the fight would have been even easier than that.

The franchise has a lot going for it, but they need to figure out their pacing.

Edit: Also, I definitely don’t need a pointless little board game. “Hey, you want to play Strike?” “Fuck no! I’m out here trying to save the fucking world! Fuck off with your minis!”

Whales and elephants have cancer suppressing genes, but the article says that there’s evidence that dinosaurs got cancer, so it’s not just size. But hell, if an ape can grow as big as Kong, who’s to say that it wouldn’t also have the cancer suppressing gene?

I remember Wil Wheaton saying this in The Guild, but was he also quoting Rand at the time?