Hahaha wow, I can't believe seven years ago I was out here writing two-pagers in reddit comments. Thanks for reminding me this exists!

When I think about the scenes on Earth in that movie, in particular the scene at the school, I think the movie is showing you what the real problem with Earth is. They're dumb, they only gaze downward, they no longer dare to dream. I think the "dust plague" is just a metaphor for this.

This movie masquerades as a hard science move (and has an incredible amount of great science!) but at the end of the day its a movie about humanity giving up hope in itself, then finding a magic future version of humanity that literally saves everyone with magic based on the power of love. I mean, its about some other stuff too, but I think that's the main theme.

It's not about surviving some hard science disaster scenario, its about giving humanity back to dreamers, optimists, and humanists... and escaping the dust-dwellers who teach at that school.

Because at the end of the day, you're right. There is no realistic "hard science" disaster scenario that would ever make space a more hospitable place than Earth. Zombies, nukes, planet shattering asteroids, every disaster scenario combined, the remnants of Earth would still be a thousand times more hospitable to life than anywhere else in space.

I'm still clutching my pearls at the Steam port of the original Halo games. People in my age will remember it as the greatest couch co-op game of all time. And when porting it to PC, they had engineers actively go in and CUT SPLITSCREEN OUT of the game. Like, they could've copy 'n' pasted it, made money, and left it in there for me to show to my wife or my nephews, for no effort at all. But instead, they paid people to spend time actively removing that feature. Wtf?

I think the stormlight characters occasionally have an inner monologue that sounds human and occasionally have a meaningful conversation. These are never going to be Sanderson's strongest points, but I think its very obvious that he's pushing himself and he's growing.

Agatha's bargain protects her from ever seeing Death's face (and therefore never being escorted into the beyond). I think you're correct that there's nothing in this bargain that will prevent her from continuing to hunt Billy and Tommy.

Don't forget results based AND cherry picked. In these three specific series, sample pool of <10 games, it works every time!

Same order of magnitude as saying "this one time it worked 100% of the time" lol

California sells rice to Asia. If I had a water problem, I'd probably start there.

At least a couple of em might shit on the floor, better not house a single one of em!

People need to watch Mortdog's Palworld video on YouTube.

Tl;dw: Patent law makes perfect sense. Cloning Pokemon is how you make a new entry in a genre, that's not illegal. But Palworld also happens to be built on an illegally ripped copy of Breath of the Wild's game engine. Allegedly.

Working with Robert Jordan's notes boosted Sanderson. Working with Tolkein's notes boosted Kay. Were these two bound to be incredibly successful and it's just a coincidence? Or would retired fantasy authors sharing their notes with young aspiring authors be a massive boost to the quality of new fantasy novels?

It's a laissez-faire kind of language

Haha sorry. I'm chill! We're chilling, we're chill I promise! lol

But you got me right, 100%. I bet my comment history probably has a few other permutations of that same rant on this subreddit over the years, lol. It's one of my "old man shakes fist at cloud" topics I guess :D

Imagine if real life physics were just like ONI physics! Spill a drop of water on the stairs, someone else spills one drip of lemonade on top of it, everyone in the basement suffocates, lol

You mean in the real world? "Nature abhors a vacuum." In ONI, the physics be giving out perfect vacuums next to regular pressure fluids like it was candy, WITH dupes going through it without breaking the magic seal, and STILL people in here be like "#1 complaint about the game is no one-button one-building no-cost perfect airlock building :("

Cory Doctorow coined a very catchy term for this: enshittification.

“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York Magazine that year for a story headlined “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery.” “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

A second creature being required in a breeding room? lol

I came here to say this. I was teaching some newbies to play toplane, they were learning matchups and they very naturally wanted to know who is the strongest level 1 in the game, what are the most terrifying level 1's they need to worry about. I had given them a bunch of answers based off champions, but we slowly realized the strongest level 1 in the game is literally anyone with LT. That's really not how it should be. Good riddance!

Here's a quote from Jerry Holkins on Penny Arcade from just a few days ago:

Multiverse shit is like an acid. It's fun to play around with, provided you have the right equipment. At root, it can make anything possible. My friend Kris Straub used to make a comic called Starslip about a type of engine that could get you anywhere instantly by slipping you to a universe where you were already there. Eventually he came to absolutely loathe this multiversal hook, but it was right there as the heart of the work where it couldn't easily be extracted, like a sliver of glass inside an organ. What he hated about it was that it made anything possible, but in a bad way. Nothing had to connect. Nothing had to be coherent. It could, certainly. But because it didn't have to, he felt like the good writing he'd done felt unearned. So if the advantage of something is also its disadvantage, this makes it a questionable if not dangerous tool.

Even if your plot isn't lazy, and in fact is quite the opposite of lazy, it's a very good plot... Everyone in the audience still has a vague feeling like... "yeah but couldn't the characters just have gotten out of this with some sort of lazy bull****?"

I kind of view the full SPOM as the "machine". The building called Electrolyzer is just the heart of it, one of the core parts. So you're building the black box with the pipes coming out of it yourself, optimizing its parts and performance, and tweaking it to your needs.

So you're playing with all of the fussiness, design, space, and power requirements of all those pumps and gas sorting removed? You're getting the benefit of all those pumps without having to pay their electricity costs?

Honestly no, me and my partner played this together years ago and we still talk about it. Games like Diablo and Path of Exile are too far down the grimdark artstyle. Games like Castle Crashers are a little too fart-jokey and no story. There's a revival of Secret of Mana coming soon I might check out, but honestly I don't have high hopes. You could try Children of Morta.

We REALLY enjoy taking turns at Rogue Legacy (1 or 2), but that's only one person playing at a time.

It's a very unique vibe. My partner would never grind for rare loot drops in any other game we've ever played - this is the only game that ever had the right vibes, artstyle, and fun to make her want to do that.

I don't know for sure, but based on what Echoing Spirit does, I'm guessing its the extremely spammable Champion Spell, which 'prints' a new copy of that same spell back into your deck every time you use it.

Everyone thinks this won't work, but imagine some sort of freemium pay-what-you-want model. You're watching the game at your friends house and there's a gold border, the ads don't show on the boards, Brad Marchand's face is digitally imposed over every player, etc. Each player on the team is in a different custom jersey.

Secrets of Grindea. Randomly stumbled across it as a couch coop game with my partner many years ago. There's never been a game before or after that made "grinding for mats" something that my partner would ever consider doing. But this game just nailed it. The graphics, the interface, everything made it just perfect.

And it really is a "hidden gem", you won't find much of a wiki, discord, or online presence. It's a passion project that some university students have spent years putting together.