a-alhazred
Alhazred's Nonsense
773 posts
Various... things.
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a-alhazred · 2 years ago
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time for some chill Warframe space ninja'ing
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a-alhazred · 3 years ago
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Red-Pilled
I really liked Matrix 4. Rather than writing an essay (yet) I’m gonna post my thoughts on viewing #2 post-first-time-excitement where I actually start seeing things I don’t like.
Also basically every online critic who says the movie is too concerned with being self-aware hates it because the thing it’s self-aware about is modern-day commercialized nerd culture which they all think is great. Wil Wheaton is going to feel like this movie is a personal attack (but he can’t say it because he’ll get cancelled for trying to call out an LGBT writer/director.)
(I also don’t think the movie is quite as masochistic as some others who like it but it definitely is a little, at least.)
Spoilers, obviously.
-The direction Jonathan Groff's take on Smith goes; I say "the direction it goes" because it's very clearly a choice that was made by someone. When he first remembers everything in the office shootout, he's not quite as good at being Hugo Weaving as the dude who played Bane was, but that "Mr. Aaannnnderrrsoooon!" and "I've missed you" are amazing and you totally think "that is absolutely Smith." Then in his next scene, where he shows up with the exiles and Merv, this really weird thing happens where he starts off still doing that and then it just inexplicably stops once he and Neo are alone and start fighting. That parting line where he says "and so, our unexpected alliance ends" would've been so much more amazing if he was still doing a little Hugo Weaving with it. The fact that Smith in this movie was originally conceived as just Hugo Weaving again and then they had to apply the "yeah people's appearances can be totally changed without their own input now" handwave to him simply because Hugo Weaving was already booked when this film was shooting makes it even more strange. The whole thing is extremely bizarre.
-I wish we got into the past 60 years a little more. I want to see what happened to the Architect, because if I'm going to believe someone that cold and calculating was just purged, I want to see it. (I know part of his character is that he had serious sour grapes over never being as good at his job as he wanted to be, but he wasn't outright incompetent, either. Or at least, the word incompetent wouldn't be appropriate unless the Oracle had never worked to change anything and thus the cycle would've broken down way more catastrophically in the future.) I hope there are plans for another movie and that part of the plan is delve more into the intervening time. I would say it was also a huge misstep implying the Oracle of all people died off-screen, but I have feeling that if there's more, we're going to learn she's quite alive; I don't think Sati herself ever even mentions her, which if I'm right about, would be a huge hint in and of itself, since Sati pretty quickly establishes herself as being more than willing to withhold information if she thinks it's a good idea. I'd love to see the Oracle's take on the current state of the world; she did say she didn't think peace would last forever, I wonder if she thinks of herself as retired and would say to anyone who asks why she disappeared, "I did what I could, I can't pick up all the slack." It would be very interesting to re-explore the idea of "no one can see past the choices they can't understand" with the current state of things, in part because being better at understanding choices is clearly the skill the Analyst has that let him usurp the Architect.
I also definitely want to see what the Merovingian’s been through and how the purge ruined his business and made him homeless.
(Worth noting that one thing I absolutely love about this movie is that it makes explicit what I've been saying has been said subtly in the trilogy for the last 20 years instead of throwing it in the dumpster, that Man and Machine have a serious case of "not so different" going on, and the Oracle saying "I'm interested in the future, and believe me, the only way to get there is together," was a huge case of a line of dialog being way more important than it seems the first time. It's not the direction I'd have gone, I think it would've been more interesting without the Machine civil war by having the Matrix be the center of all unrest to emphasize that everyone needs it like MxO tried and then lost it's budget for, but the direction it actually goes is not at all bad. I love that the current state of the setting is "it's not perfect by any means, there are still terrible villains and bad things happen to good people, but the world is objectively a better place than it was during the cycle." The end of the trilogy showed that the Oracle succeeded, and it hasn't been undone.)
I also want more specifics on what happened to Zion. Is it actually a total, wiped out ruin, or are there still people there, hopelessly trapped in a failed state? (State in the political sense.)
-I was totally wrong about the Macguffin being the long-thought-lost kills witch for Dark Storm, but I'd have liked for someone to have actually mentioned Dark Storm, especially with Neo having his moment where he hasn't yet been shown how the world is indeed a better place than he left if even if it's not perfect. That would've been the perfect time for someone to mention, if not Neo himself, "and no one's even thought to attempt to clear the sky with the cycle broken?" because it’s seriously an important part of why the entirety of the setting is the way it is. I still think that should be a plot point eventually, and I think if this franchise ever either wants to close out for good or have a major shake-up, clearing the sky should be how it's done, because it's the perfect set up for change that doesn't remove the entire potential for conflict/storytelling in the setting, where Dark Storm is what has to happen for the world as a whole to heal, but it obviously won't be an instantaneous fix. Also, the entire reason that the kill switch would be a fine plot device to base an entire story around is precisely because the idea of clearing the sky has yet to have ever been broached at all; clearly even the Machines think it’s impossible. (If there’s even a kill switch to find it would also take a lot of steam out of that absurd “The Second Renaissance is Machine propaganda meant for humans” theory since it would make the old-world humans slightly less comically stupid. I mean, I’ve always been enough of a pessimist realist that it never seemed unrealistic to me at all, but a lot of people don’t agree.)
-The climax kind-of runs out of steam as a set piece. It's not really badly done, but the excitement runs out. It would've been more exciting if everyone who isn’t Neo and Trinity hadn't gotten to a vehicle and had to do a more traditional fight through the zombie horde. Like, it should've been a more extended and more Matrix-y version of the intro cinematic from Left 4 Dead.
-Would have liked to have seen more of the Mnemosyne's crew. Especially Berg, because I may, hypothetically, have had a small celebrity crush on Brian J. Smith since even before he did Sense8. Another one for the "hope it's in the next film" category. (Oh and Berg totally thinks Neo is hot, that line about the long hair and beard working for him is absolutely not just “wow Neo is so cool.” Brian Smith came out between doing Sense8 and this, Lana Wachowski totally wrote that in for him like, ‘enjoy being out and not giving a single fuck what anyone thinks my gay bro.’)
On a random note, I'm extremely glad everyone pronounces "Mnemosyne" incorrectly, because “NEM-uh-seen” sounds better and rolls off the tongue easier than “nuh-MAH-suh-nee.”
Oh I DID call the foreshadowing from the Mnemosyne's dedication plaque, that there would be serious betrayal from some or all of the crew, but I got the details wrong, I thought someone was going to betray Neo. Clearly it refers to Bugs disobeying orders and quite nearly getting drummed out for it. Or maybe someone on the crew will betray Neo in the next film, but until there is a next film...
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a-alhazred · 3 years ago
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Metroid Dread, barring technical difficulties!
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a-alhazred · 3 years ago
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more bugs with Aliens Fireteam Elite!
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a-alhazred · 3 years ago
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bug hunting in Aliens Fireteam Elite
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a-alhazred · 3 years ago
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This is most likely because I’m currently in the middle of a re-watch but still.
reblog and put in the tags the fictional character death that destroyed you the most
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a-alhazred · 3 years ago
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Please stop equating "this has tropes" to analysis.
Please stop equating "this has tropes" to "this is bad."
Chris Pratt ain’t gonna win an Oscar for this film (this comment really needs a replacement because it’s not like anyone takes the Oscars seriously anymore, but anyway) but it’s a fun little sci-fi action flick.
I almost didn’t watch this movie not because the premise is completely ludicrous (although it is, and if you know me, you know I’m all for a ludicrous premise,) but because I could see in my head the first act of the movie where the people in the setting have to be sold on that premise.
Then, that didn’t happen.
Flash forward twelve months; the ludicrous premise is sold. The world knows it’s real. The plot can move along without trying to do incredibly rote drama where we have to watch the characters disbelieving for twenty minutes.
Some of that rote drama still makes it in; we still have to watch Chris Pratt be sad about his family and all that jazz, but it’s kept to a minimal level. Or rather, the actual content of those moments is kept to a minimal level, those scenes are way too long and this movie should’ve been twenty minutes shorter.
Look, at no point am I going to say this movie is a misunderstood masterpiece, it’s like the moto-boner from Battle: L.A. has erectile dysfunction, and that wasn’t exactly a misunderstood masterpiece either... but it was moderately fun, and so is this. So much of the criticism anything like this gets reads to me like people complaining that it’s not cliché enough even as they complain about The Tropes™ in it. It’s like pretense at wanting something different, but being very uncomfortable when the lockstep pattern isn’t followed.
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I hate to break it to this article, but all of those can be traced back to older things as well. Alien and Terminator are classics because they were masterfully executed using good ideas, not wholly new ideas. On the off-chance this list was meant to invoke that competent execution, it’s certainly... flawed. Like, lol, ID4, Starship Troopers and Edge of Tomorrow? I’m sorry, I can’t stand Tom Cruise, my major hot take is that Edge of Tomorrow would’ve been vastly improved if he was replaced with Chrisp Rat. I actually like Starship Troopers, but it’s also in that bizarre position of being the one time Paul Verhoven somehow managed to be too subtle and so it didn’t really land like it could have. And Independence Day is... Independence Day.
(To be clear, this is not a condemnation of authors using tools. Literary devices are called devices for a reason; they work. Storytelling is based on rules, and ignoring all of those rules makes a bad story. The problem is that it can go too far in the other direction; those rules do have wiggle-room. If you’re writing a sci-fi story where, say, normal people are dealing with extraordinary things, ask yourself if you really need to have a scene with the Annoying Government Official™ whose sole purpose is to stonewall the main characters by being a complete idiot and ignoring all the evidence in front of them, or if you just put that character in there because it feels like something this type of story should have and nothing actually changes if they’re absent. TBH I have a hard time thinking of one of these characters who isn’t either pointless, annoying to sit through, or both that isn’t Walter Peck.)
Please stop equating "this has tropes" to analysis.
Please stop equating "this has tropes" to "this is bad."
Screencapped article; https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/07/02/tomorrow-war-enlists-all-the-alien-invasion-movie-tropes-it-can/
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a-alhazred · 4 years ago
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Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media
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In William Gibson’s 1992 novel “Idoru,” a media executive describes her company’s core audience:
“Best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth…no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”
It’s an astonishingly great passage, not just for the image it evokes, but for how it captures the character of the speaker and her contempt for the people who made her fortune.
It’s also a beautiful distillation of the 1990s anxiety about TV’s role in a societal “dumbing down,” that had brewed for a long time, at least since the Nixon-JFK televised debates, whose outcome was widely attributed not to JFK’s ideas, but to Nixon’s terrible TV manner.
Neil Postman’s 1985 “Amusing Ourselves To Death” was a watershed here, comparing the soundbitey Reagan-Dukakis debates with the long, rhetorically complex Lincoln-Douglas debates of the previous century.
(Incidentally, when I finally experienced those debates for myself, courtesy of the 2009 BBC America audiobook, I was more surprised by Lincoln’s unequivocal, forceful repudiations of slavery abolition than by the rhetoric’s nuance)
https://memex.craphound.com/2009/01/20/lincoln-douglas-debate-audiobook-civics-history-and-rhetoric-lesson-in-16-hours/
“Media literacy” scholarship entered the spotlight, and its left flank — epitomized by Chomsky’s 1988 “Manufacturing Consent” — claimed that an increasingly oligarchic media industry was steering society, rather than reflecting it.
Thus, when the internet was demilitarized and the general public started trickling — and then rushing — to use it, there was a widespread hope that we might break free of the tyranny of concentrated, linear programming (in the sense of “what’s on,” and “what it does to you”).
Much of the excitement over Napster wasn’t about getting music for free — it was about the mix-tapification of all music, where your custom playlists would replace the linear album.
Likewise Tivo, whose ad-skipping was ultimately less important than the ability to watch the shows you liked, rather than the shows that were on.
Blogging, too: the promise was that a community of reader-writers could assemble a daily “newsfeed” that reflected their idiosyncratic interests across a variety of sources, surfacing ideas from other places and even other times.
The heady feeling of the time is hard to recall, honestly, but there was a thrill to getting up and reading the news that you chose, listening to a playlist you created, then watching a show you picked.
And while there were those who fretted about the “Daily Me” (what we later came to call the “filter bubble”) the truth was that this kind of active media creation/consumption ranged far more widely than the monopolistic media did.
The real “bubble” wasn’t choosing your own programming — it was everyone turning on their TV on Thursday nights to Friends, Seinfeld and The Simpsons.
The optimism of the era is best summarized in a taxonomy that grouped media into two categories: “lean back” (turn it on and passively consume it) and “lean forward” (steer your media consumption with a series of conscious decisions that explores a vast landscape).
Lean-forward media was intensely sociable: not just because of the distributed conversation that consisted of blog-reblog-reply, but also thanks to user reviews and fannish message-board analysis and recommendations.
I remember the thrill of being in a hotel room years after I’d left my hometown, using Napster to grab rare live recordings of a band I’d grown up seeing in clubs, and striking up a chat with the node’s proprietor that ranged fondly and widely over the shows we’d both seen.
But that sociability was markedly different from the “social” in social media. From the earliest days of Myspace and Facebook, it was clear that this was a sea-change, though it was hard to say exactly what was changing and how.
Around the time Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, a close friend a blazing argument with a TV executive who insisted that the internet was just a passing fad: that the day would come when all these online kids grew up, got beaten down by work and just wanted to lean back.
To collapse on the sofa and consume media that someone else had programmed for them, anaesthetizing themselves with passive media that didn’t make them think too hard.
This guy was obviously wrong — the internet didn’t disappear — but he was also right about the resurgence of passive, linear media.
But this passive media wasn’t the “must-see TV” of the 80s and 90s.
Rather, it was the passivity of the recommendation algorithm, which created a per-user linear media feed, coupled with mechanisms like “endless scroll” and “autoplay,” that incinerated any trace of an active role for the “consumer” (a very apt term here).
It took me a long time to figure out exactly what I disliked about algorithmic recommendation/autoplay, but I knew I hated it. The reason my 2008 novel LITTLE BROTHER doesn’t have any social media? Wishful thinking. I was hoping it would all die in a fire.
Today, active media is viewed with suspicion, considered synonymous with Qanon-addled boomers who flee Facebook for Parler so they can stan their favorite insurrectionists in peace, freed from the tyranny of the dread shadowban.
But I’m still on team active media. I would rather people actively choose their media diets, in a truly sociable mode of consumption and production, than leaning back and getting fed whatever is served up by the feed.
Today on Wired, Duke public policy scholar Philip M Napoli writes about lean forward and lean back in the context of Trump’s catastrophic failure to launch an independent blog, “From the Desk of Donald J Trump.”
https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-trumps-failed-blog-proves-he-was-just-howling-into-the-void/
In a nutshell, Trump started a blog which he grandiosely characterized as a replacement for the social media monopolists who’d kicked him off their platforms. Within a month, he shut it down.
While Trump claimed the shut-down was all part of the plan, it’s painfully obvious that the real reason was that no one was visiting his website.
Now, there are many possible, non-exclusive explanations for this.
For starters, it was a very bad social media website. It lacked even rudimentary social tools. The Washington Post called it “a primitive one-way loudspeaker,” noting its lack of per-post comments, a decades old commonplace.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/21/trump-online-traffic-plunge/
Trump paid (or more likely, stiffed) a grifter crony to build the site for him, and it shows: the “Like” buttons didn’t do anything, the video-sharing buttons created links to nowhere, etc. From the Desk… was cursed at birth.
But Napoli’s argument is that even if Trump had built a good blog, it would have failed. Trump has a highly motivated cult of tens of millions of people — people who deliberately risked death to follow him, some even ingesting fish-tank cleaner and bleach at his urging.
The fact that these cult-members were willing to risk their lives, but not endure poor web design, says a lot about the nature of the Trump cult, and its relationship to passive media.
The Trump cult is a “push media” cult, simultaneously completely committed to Trump but unwilling to do much to follow him.
That’s the common thread between Fox News (and its successors like OANN) and MAGA Facebook.
And it echoes the despairing testimony of the children of Fox cultists, that their boomer parents consume endless linear TV, turning on Fox from the moment they arise and leaving it on until they fall asleep in front of it (also, reportedly, how Trump spent his presidency).
Napoli says that Trump’s success on monopoly social media platforms and his failure as a blogger reveals the role that algorithmically derived, per-user, endless scroll linear media played in the ascendancy of his views.
It makes me think of that TV exec and his prediction of the internet’s imminent disappearance (which, come to think of it, is not so far off from my own wishful thinking about social media’s disappearance in Little Brother).
He was absolutely right that this century has left so many of us exhausted, wanting nothing more than the numbness of lean-back, linear feeds.
But up against that is another phenomenon: the resurgence of active political movements.
After a 12-month period that saw widescale civil unrest, from last summer’s BLM uprising to the bizarre storming of the capital, you can’t really call this the golden age of passivity.
While Fox and OANN consumption might be the passive daily round of one of Idoru’s “vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organisms craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed,” that is in no way true of Qanon.
Qanon is an active pastime, a form of collaborative storytelling with all the mechanics of the Alternate Reality Games that the lean-forward media advocates who came out of the blogging era love so fiercely:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/06/no-vitiated-air/#other-hon
Meanwhile, the “clicktivism” that progressive cynics decried as useless performance a decade ago has become an active contact sport, welding together global movements from Occupy to BLM that use the digital to organize the highly physical.
That’s the paradox of lean-forward and lean-back: sometimes, the things you learn while leaning back make you lean forward — in fact, they might just get you off the couch altogether.
I think that Napoli is onto something. The fact that Trump’s cultists didn’t follow him to his crummy blog tells us that Trump was an effect, not a cause (something many of us suspected all along, as he’s clearly neither bright nor competent enough to inspire a movement).
But the fact that “cyberspace keeps everting” (to paraphrase “Spook Country,” another William Gibson novel) tells us that passive media consumption isn’t a guarantee of passivity in the rest of your life (and sometimes, it’s a guarantee of the opposite).
And it clarifies the role that social media plays in our discourse — not so much a “radicalizer” as a means to corral likeminded people together without them having to do much. Within those groups are those who are poised for action, or who can be moved to it.
The ease with which these people find one another doesn’t produce a deterministic outcome. Sometimes, the feed satisfies your urge for change (“clicktivism”). Sometimes, it fuels it (“radicalizing”).
Notwithstanding smug media execs, the digital realm equips us to “express our mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire” by doing much more than “changing the channels on a universal remote” — for better and for worse.
Image: Ian Burt (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/oddsock/267206444
CC BY: https://creativecommo
ns.org/licenses/by/2.0/
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a-alhazred · 5 years ago
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Hey I wrote something for a change.
It’s embarrassing fan-fiction but I’m posting it everywhere I can anyway because it’s been so long since I finished something.
Dreaming of a World Where all is Good...
It doesn't take Sam long to realize that inside the red armor, behind the toothy mask, is his son.
It's not until Jason comes home bruised and bloodied that Sam realizes his son could've died.
AO3 / FF.net
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a-alhazred · 5 years ago
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Shameless Referral Linking
if you pick up Division 2 while it's on sale for 3 bucks plz use my referral link so I can get the Hunter outfit. (All these people with FRIENDS and ACQUAINTANCES who got it easy, sheesh, what am I, sociable?)
https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/the-division/the-division-2/friend-referral?refid=D_kGmFqFfP4GL-k-VJYuWQ
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a-alhazred · 5 years ago
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old-skool FPS fun with Painkiller. There's a Giant Stake Gun and everything!
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a-alhazred · 5 years ago
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Back to #TheOuterWorlds in a few minutes!
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a-alhazred · 5 years ago
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Thoughts on how to make The Matrix 4 not shit.
As one of the four people in the world who actually liked Reloaded and Revolutions, I actually can't wait for #TheMatrix4. It'll probably be a giant dumpster fire even for someone of my... unpopular tastes... but I don't care, I want it anyway.
Here’s some realtalk on how maybe make The Matrix 4 good, though. Broadly, take the same idea Matrix Online had for what comes post-movies and tell it better. More specifically:
- Minimal appearances by the old characters. The ones who are still alive had special roles to play in that story arc, there is no reason for them to have special roles in civilization moving on. Maybe have Kid wearing Neo's coat.
- Show those civilizations. There are three: Zion, the Machines, and the Exiles. "The Second Renaissance" did an excellent job portraying the Machines as an actual species with individuals and not some nebulous hive entity, a point often missed. Show them with recognizable concepts (individuality, for example) but with bizarre non-human takes on those concepts. Rama Kandra and his family were an attempt at this that somehow missed even though it was one of the most literal, least symbolic things in the series. In a different context I might actually criticize that scene for abandoning the usual subtly of the series, but like the movie adaptation of Starship Troopers, it was somehow actually too subtle.
Show the Merovingian as a mob boss that the exiles have to live under. He can have a character arc because he would've been assimilated by Smith the same as everything else and there's no reason to assume he came out of that psychologically unscathed. He doesn’t have to go crazy, but he can be gain nuance beyond his snobby pursuit of hedonism 100% of the time.
- Actually focus on the Matrix to avoid what turned everyone off about Revolutions. The earth is still ruined and if it can recover, it won't be in the lifetime of several generations, so everyone needs the Matrix. The humans need it because they can't maintain a population larger than Zion by moving out, because there's nowhere to move to. There are still humans (the majority) who would choose the comfort of the Matrix over the real world anyway. The Machines need it for the same reason they always have. The exiles need it because it's their Zion; they have nowhere else to go.
- That's all the worldbuilding. The plot should focus on how the three civilizations interact now that the Machines are willing to allow outside human life beyond their direct control. Since everyone needs the Matrix, a colder war for more control begins.  The exiles still have to fight to survive, which is how the Merovingian maintains power, by being a unifying, organizing force. The Machines' agreement with Neo did not include them. The humans have extremists like Morpheus who still want to shut the whole thing down on principle and others who adhere to common sense and say "principles are fine but the reality is we either accept this or they'll go back to killing us."
The Machines are similarly split, wondering why they have to put up with this at all. The usual excuse given to answer “why don’t they just use cows for batteries” is “because they’re three-laws compliant and they must still technically serve man, so they made the Matrix to give man a comfortable life.” At a meeting, the Machine representative debunks by explaining that no, they aren't still three-laws compliant, if they ever even were at all. They didn’t need to build the Matrix to technically satisfy their programming, thank you very much, they didn't go with cows because as sentient beings who are not psychotic, they simply aren't genocidal maniacs. They spared humanity on moral grounds, but now that humanity is free, they need to not make it more trouble than it's worth. Great opportunity for nuance here; we know that the humans did not extend this morality to the Machines originally, which is why the war started to begin with. Maybe some of the Machines are not altruistic, but they hold their unwillingness to commit genocide as proof of moral superiority? Do they clash with Machines who say “that was so long ago and we’ve been manipulating them for so long that present-day humans should not be judged on their ancestors’ actions, they aren’t remotely the same civilization?” Do they hold this opinion out of altruism themselves, or is it just a logical conclusion? Rama Kandra explained that they can use the same words to describe their feelings the same way humans do but they aren’t human so they experience those things differently; are the Machines even capable of altruism as humans understand it? If not, does it even matter, so long as they’re capable of it in their own way?
I'm not trying to re-contextualize the Machines here to say they're pure victims and humanity were the real villains, but I *hate* how the fanbase (such as it is) always ignores that "The Second Renaissance" gave them characterization beyond flat villains. They aren't a villainous force of nature, the narrative equivalent of an evil, amorphous blob. They are a civilization, and the story and setting become much more interesting when they are acknowledged as such. Very important, actual line: "May there be mercy on Man and Machine for their sins."
This setting has so many elements ripe for interesting stories, if they would only be used.
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a-alhazred · 6 years ago
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I’d make an exception if there’s an important character or characterss who is/are very into the topic at hand in-story, but other than that... yeaaaahhh.
I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here but
“Internal consistency is more important than straight realism”
^words that need to be pounded into the heads of many many people who fancy themselves literary authorities
Goes for sci-fi, too. There’s the weird variation in Star Trek where fans get made fun of for being too pedantic, but the reason they’re pedantic is that 3.5 shows spent years setting up consistent rules for how things worked whenever a new problem came along (as a result, Star Trek is much more on the “hard” end of sci-fi than most realize) and then you get to Enterprise and especially Discovery where the material is made by people who don’t give enough of a shit to even pretend to be consistent. (Honestly one of the most damning things you can say about Discovery is that when you can use Voyager to school them on continuity, you know they done fucked up bad.)
All of this might be why I’ve been so taken by planetary romance like Derpstiny Destiny and Warframe as of late.
People who get really into science in fantasy worldbuilding are the most boring and pedantic people alive
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a-alhazred · 6 years ago
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Back to Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines!
Where do you want to go?
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a-alhazred · 6 years ago
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Gonna get spookied with Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines!
Fan of LA By Night but never played this and wondering why everyone loves it when Nines Rodriguez, Isaac Abrams and Strauss show up? Some of ‘em might just show up here...
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a-alhazred · 6 years ago
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Chillaxing with Division 2, may play something else later, maybe not, idk
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