#maybe the writing will nosedive in quality as it goes on | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

thebakunawa · 2 years ago

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I think the most damning thing about EK that people aren't mentioning enough (or maybe don't realize if they got into the game late in dev and don't know what was re-released vs what's actually new) is that the writing gets bad specifically once you get to what they've supposedly spent the last *TWO YEARS* developing. Like its not even 'declining quality as it goes on' bad where you can blame the devs being overworked or something like that - its a very clear distinction between the last pre-hiatus update, and the actual new content that wasn't re-released after they took everything down.

Combined with how they've managed the release post-hiatus and how unusually dodgy they are when asked about their beta testing which would give a much more clear idea of how development actually went, it *really* feels like they spent the vast majority of the last two years working on their third game, and then when the deadline for EK came up they panicked and basically started the game in the last couple months, maybe.

Exactly!

Thank you anon! I feel like a lot of people are quick to forgive when the waiting time took 2 whole years with barely any update and if they had any it was sketchy and dodgy at best. The moment you hit anything Chapter 5 and the rest it all nosedives so fast you end up wondering if you played another game.

I also feel like people forget to talk about how when Call Me Under was announced, what little news we heard from Errant Kingdom disappeared almost completely. They felt like a complete afterthought, like a project they committed to but lost interest and tried to hype up the newest one they had. I agree with you that they probably just crammed the most sensible things during the tail end to say they finished the game. It wouldnt be a surprise if news spread that they actually spent it finishing their newest game.

Speaking of, I recently replayed the game and you can tell how much quality and care there is for the first set of chapters that it makes you think the game is going to be good but you get past it and it just falls apart. Given how they basically gave us silence about behind the scenes and progress for Errant Kingdom, I think its safe to say to always take their new games with a grain of salt.

#errant kingdom #anon #bakunawa answered

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serenagaywaterford · 6 years ago

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1) Feel free to keep rambling! Not only I love talking with level-headed fandom people, but our opinions seem to converge (even if my wording comes off as weird/wrong because of Tumblr's word limit). Anyway. I had many issues with S2, besides Serena's arc I mean (I'll get back to her). Blessed be the goddamned plotholes! Fred becomes a cockroach that just won't die (Red Center), because he's essential to the plot. Same goes for Aunt Lydia. (Although I'm kinda glad that she's alive, because

2) I LOVE Dowd’s acting and I’m excited about her background story.) Emily comes back from the Colonies and is smfh 100% healthy. Moreover, Gilead has been surprisingly lenient with Fred and Serena’s constant fuckups in S2 (mutilated fingers aside). June won’t leave with Emily, bc MOTHERHOOD (more like there’s a s3 on the horizon and drama is needed). And don’t get me started on that slow pace. The beginning and the finale were explosive of course,but some mid-season episodes?

3) They were dragging on and on. Examples? 2x11, where only 2 things happen: a) June gives birth to Nicole, b) Fred and Serena make it clear that they want to tear each other apart (duh). The only redeeming qualities of that episode was the wolf symbolism and the excellent cinematography. I get it, the series is successful and has more seasons ahead. But if only they had squeezed some episodes, it would have been so much better.

—-

OMG YAY!!! I’m gonna answer these in pieces since I’ll prolly flood a giant essay otherwise. Cos, lbr, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear I had multiple personalities and was secretly sending these to myself from a fugue state, that’s how much we agree! Cos I’ve just read through all your messages and sat here going “YES! YES!” lol. I think you, me, maybe 5 other people on tumblr, and 1 TV reviewer are of the same mindset and it’s such a relief to find others who are reasonable and critical about the show/Serena.

Yes, Fred not dying was just so fucking stupid I couldn’t deal. Like, it’s not even like, “Well, he didn’t die which is crazy but he’s horribly injured and disfigured cos I dunno, he was like 15 feet FROM A MASSIVE BOMB EXPLODING.” But noooo. Instead we get Fred in hospital with a scratchy throat for like a few weeks, and when he comes back he’s got a little bit of a limp. No burns, nothing. And, to top it off, he’s got all the strength and balance of a perfectly healthy man to whip the shit out of his wife. I get they needed to get him out of the way and out of service so Serena and June could have all sorts of treasonous hi-jinks together but surely… they could have considered having Fred not 15 feet from the bomb. It killed handmaids that were way farther away than that. Just a thought. Deffo an eye-roll moment.

Aunt Lydia I’m less irritated about simply cos, like you, I love Ann Dowd and think she’s done a fab job. And we honestly haven’t got enough of her backstory and I wanna know that too. I think this show can only really captivate if it tells ALL the women’s stories, not just the victims. Like how does a woman become an Aunt? How do they justify that? Or is it simply a type of socio-religio-politcal brainwashing, akin to a lot of Nazi Party supporters? Is she a True Believer? Like, honestly, wtf is up with her? Like, cos so many of us can empathise with the Handmaids and we understand how that came about–but it takes more sides to tell a full story. So, Aunt Lydia being back… I’m not too fussed about. I really do consider Emily so damaged that I would never trust her with a baby–but that’s me. She’s been so broken, so traumatized, and like I don’t blame her at all ofc, but she needs softness and patience and no stress ever again. Like, she is not well emotionally by any stretch.

Which leads into the Colonies bullshit. That was just really bad writing. She, Janine, etc, were there for MONTHS. Like, June ran away and was gone for 92 days (Thanks for that count, Serena!). And then add on whatever time passed between her being returned to the Waterfords house and when Lilly set off the bomb. That is a long ass time to be splashing about in radioactive waste. Emily’s teeth were falling out, right? Like, how she went from literally dying of radiation poisoning to “Totally healthy enough to pop out some totally healthy babies!” I’ll never understand. The loss of the Handmaids in the bombing isn’t a good enough reasoning. A dictatorship like Gilead could easily have just conscripted a bunch of Econowives with the sweep of a pen. That is how these militant theocracies work. They’re already half-indoctrinated anyway. It was dumb to put Emily and Janine there in the first place if you knew they had to come back, as they are main cast members.

I always thought Fred and Serena were getting away with too much but I wrote it off as Fred (and Serena lbr) being a HUGE part of bringing about Gilead in the first place so they get some leeway. But then, you see Warren and Cushing being dealt with fairly severely for basically hearsay. (Okay, Warren’s I get cos you had outcry from Janine in a massively public display and backup from Naomi.) I guess because Fred/Serena’s fuckups were a little more ~private, they could excuse/lie about them/cover them up them easier? Cushing was dealt with way to easily. Like… no. “Fred” signs some paper and suddenly Cushing is being disappeared immediately. I suppose Fred took over Pryce’s place in the hierarchy? Who knows. And from what I understand, nobody in SOJ knew about June’s escape to the big country house. But c’mon, one Handmaid kills herself, the new one another starting shit every where she goes with other Handmaids and is pals with two of the most notorious other Handmaids (Emily and Janine), then is “kidnapped”, is partners with the bomber, then runs away again, then again… Sigh.

June not leaving… I just… it was so obvious that she wouldn’t cos otherwise there is no show. But why bother with all that drama then. Like, what if Emily hadn’t been there??? June had no way of knowing she’d be meeting up with Emily. She would have just dumped Nicole in some van and run back? Ugh.

And the pace was bad. ITA. There are whole episodes I don’t even bother with on rewatches. I thought the season premiere was great, then it fell of a cliff and lost my interest until about the 5th episode? Then it got going nicely (altho 2x07 wasn’t great either), then took another nosedive in 2x10 and sort of coasted almost aimlessly until the finale. I don’t like to hate on June but honestly the really 100% June-centric episodes bore the shit out of me. 2x02/03 and 2x11 being the biggest culprits. I’m just tired of the excessive use of flashbacks that all basically say the same thing now. And Moss is a great actress but there’s such thing as too much of a good thing. Not to mention, Nick and June bore me to tears as well (SACRILEGE! Send the indignant rabid fangirls on a rampage into my inbox!) so when there’s a lot of focus on that clusterfuck of inanity, I tune out. I can’t help it. I find them so annoying lol. (Which is were I usually lose common ground with basically everyone in this fandom cos everyone loves Nick for some reason I just cannot understand. If you like him, I apologise! I just can’t. I liked him more at the beginning but as it’s gone on the less I give even the slightest shit about him.)

Also, like I found 2x02 and 2x03 to just be… a waste of time? Like, okay, we got to see the Econopeople and how they live or whatever but to me, there was zero point to the whole thing because we all know June isn’t going to get away with it. So, why waste 2 whole episodes building to something everyone knows ain’t happening just for the sake of some worldbuilding that I’m guessing could have been done some other more cogent way? 2x04 was basically just to show more breaking June down in various ways. Then 2x05 was just to show the Colonies and had a lot of filler in it about that. I still don’t understand the point of the “wedding” bits. It wasn’t uplifting or hopeful at all. It was still really dark, like killing the Wife. I only really liked watching Serena go apeshit because her babyslave isn’t making proper gossipy conversation. It’s just an interesting angle cos finally Serena gets what she asks for with a super obedient Offred, and low and behold, it actually sucks and she wants June back. Story of Serena’s life and she never fucking learns lol. And Aunt Lydia flexing on Serena was hilarious. I just enjoy watching them go head to head. Not to mention the grotesque child brides thing. Gross. Super gross. Like, a bunch of stuff happened but I’m not convinced it needed to be dragged out over 4 episodes like that. Not to mention it was all really depressing. I remember watching and going, “JESUS, this show is fucking depressing. Why am I torturing myself?”

But yeah, 2x11 was super slow and all the important things that happened (that you listed) could have taken 10 minutes. Like I get too that she had to see Hannah in order to… make her decision in the finale make sense??? Was that the reason? I still don’t know. All of this could have been dealt with way more quickly and with just as much emotional gravity had it been done well.

I really like Moira but she’s been given shit all to do. I liked how we got a little insight into her and Odette. A LITTLE. But a huge weakness is that the Toronto peeps are so divorced from the drama that it often seems, not pointless, but something like it. It definitely slows the pace down to a crawl. That’s why I thought 2x09 worked well because it married both worlds. (I will never understand why 1x07 exists the way it does. What a stupid episode. I do not care about Luke’s journey, tbh. I’m here for the women–good, evil, or inbetween; not an entire episode devoted to him–especially not when we could have had Moira’s instead. I accept that his is intertwined with June’s attempted escape but… meh. It’s just like I will never care about Nice Guy TM Nick’s backstory or character. I don’t care about Fred’s childhood, or Warren’s marriage, or Luke’s manbabying, or Nick’s manpain. Eek.)

I dunno. Personally I think it could have been tightened up a bit better. But again, what do I know? I’m just a viewer. I’m sure other viewers have completely the opposite opinion.

#rants and raves #Anonymous

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ainvestops · 5 years ago

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Focus on what will not change in uncertain times

By Dhirendra Kumar

One of the problems in living in an environment where there’s a new piece of supposedly breaking news every few hours is that when some actually important breaking news comes along, we sort of expect it to pass quickly. Unfortunately, we now have something that could be the breaking news for months, possibly years, something we are not used to. This is particularly true for investing in equities or equity-backed investments.

The breathless stock market commentary that business channels anchors the world over specialise in will be a little difficult if it’s the same thing over and over again, week after week, month after month. Or maybe this is something that they already know how to do.

In fact, the maniacal fluctuations in the equity markets indicate this mental gap. As I’m writing this piece, the Indian markets have had a downward circuit breaker early morning and are now up more than 5,000 points from that. Maybe an upper circuit is on the menu before the day ends, which will be a tale to tell to future generations. Why is this happening? My guess is that the problem is a psychological one. The punters want to come to a decision on how bad is this going to be RIGHT NOW because they live in the world of RIGHT NOW.

Except that this story has barely begun. As the famous quote goes, this is just the end of the beginning. Let alone the eventual economic impact, even the direct medical impact is not yet known. So the equity markets, manic-depressive even at the best of times, have gone completely bananas. Stock prices are often said to encapsulate a prediction of the future that is derived from the actual actions of a large group of people who have skin in the game. As such, they are generally more trustable than mere words of experts because in spouting words, there is no cost to being wrong.

So what are the markets telling us at this point? They’re saying that nothing can be said, which is fine by me. The correct conclusion to draw at this point is that no conclusion can be drawn. So as investors and savers, where does that leave us? The answer, as it always does, depends more on your own current financial situation than on what’s happening externally. If you are heavily and aggressively invested mostly in equity-backed investments at this point, then… then I have nothing to say to you because you either know what you are doing, or you are not going to listen to anyone so let’s just move on. If you are at the other extreme, in that you have almost all fixed income investments, then you’re out of it too.

Most Indians are in the second category but that’s for the general public. I expect most of those who are actually reading this page are somewhere between the two extremes. You have a variety of investments and some proportion of that is in equities. Over the last few days, the value of your investments has taken a nosedive. Now, faced with this kind of a destruction of value, you don’t know what to do. Should you cut your losses and run? There’s obviously no precise answer. However, there are a few general principles that should be paid attention to. The most basic is that despite the upheaval that has started, the underlying drivers of economic and business activity are not going away permanently. There will be huge changes and uncertainties but there have been many such phases over the last few decades.

The contours of the upheaval will be different— mostly because the roots of this crisis are not economic. However, a lot else will eventually resemble earlier crises. For example, we have always seen that in bad times, the fundamental qualities and strengths of businesses shine through. The result is that although every company does badly, the good ones do less badly and recover better while many of their competitors just die out. This means that eventually, the crises turns out to be good for companies that are much better run than their competitors. To give an example that may seem foolhardy today, I fully expect this to play out amongst airlines in India.

Things appear to be particularly uncertain compared to other crisis that savers have faced, but it’s better to focus on what won’t change than what is unknown.

(The writer is CEO, Value Research)

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boldlykeenblizzard · 5 years ago

Text

Focus on what will not change in uncertain times

By Dhirendra Kumar

Things appear to be particularly uncertain compared to other crisis that savers have faced, but it’s better to focus on what won’t change than what is unknown.

(The writer is CEO, Value Research)

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The post Focus on what will not change in uncertain times appeared first on Investium.

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