#sci fi review

[hannahwatcheshorror]

SUBSERVIENCE (2024)

Did I pick this film because I wanted to watch Megan Fox be hot and pretend to be a robot? You bet your a** I did. The fact that it was a spooky film was only a bonus. Is this film literally just Adult M3GAN? Yes. Is that entirely underwhelming? Yes. Is it a bad film? No. Worth watching? I’ll answer that with a question, how much did you like M3GAN? (also see (COMPANION)

⭐⭐⭐.5

A father gets a maid robot to try and help him around the house. His little girl, Isla, names the robot Alice after Alice in Wonderland and likes her a lot. There is a minor incident with broken glass but Isla isn’t hurt, only Alice. Alice heals almost instantly which is creepy but also not that creepy because it is the future and she is a highly sophisticated robot. Turns out the wife, Maggie, who you think is dead is just in the hospital waiting on a new heart. She is less than impressed with how stunning Alice is and doesn’t quite believe that the daughter chose her (which is true). Alice catches Nick watching Casablanca which she knows about but has never actually seen so Nick orders her to erase her memory of the movie plot and watch it with him. After a sensual restart she is happy to watch the movie in, what I can only describe as, the scene from Wall-E when he watches the musical on TV. It is literally just that scene, only instead of a cute little rusty robot we have Hot Megan Fox and instead of Hello Dolly the movie that is changing the robots wiring is Casablanca. Do you guys get what the fuck I’m saying here! Y’all thought you were getting M3GAN 2.0 and we got Wall-E 2.0. 

Just kidding, this was M3GAN the sequel with some Bicentennial Man sprinkled in there for good measure. I said in my M3GAN review humans would only make a doll that advanced for war or for fucking and in this movie I’m right. Maggie gets the chance at a new heart but before she goes in for surgery she has a heart to heart (ha) with Alice about taking care of Nick in case things don’t go so well. Which is good because a massive storm happens and they can’t get the heart in time so it is given to someone else. Alice tries to cheer Nick up with a handjob but it only makes him more sad (can’t imagine why). Then Alice adopts Maggie's voice to help seduce Nick and fucks him. It was a sexy scene but it was a cheating scene and those make me really sad, even if Megan Fox is involved. Nick is feeling really guilty suddenly (good) and Maggie actually gets a new heart. After recovering for some time she comes home to Islas' delight and Alice's chagrin.

The primary user, Nick, needs to be protected so Alice goes and kills a guy threatening his job (that is one way to solve the problem). Nick is so surprised the guy is dead he doesn’t even suspect that his SIM could have done it (because the bots don’t kill people, right?). But then when Alice tries to politely ask Maggie if she can fuck her husband, Maggie finds out they fucked before and flips out, while she and Nick fight the baby boy is crying. Alice takes it upon herself to attempt drowning the poor thing as she suddenly thinks this is the best thing for her primary user. They fight her, she gets some scary visual damage, and she goes down. She is taken back to the lab in a scene nearly shot-for-shot like when M3GAN was taken back and then she used her AI to hack the computers only this time Alice killed the nerds. 

Now Alice has two bodies, her old busted one that she takes to talk to Nick, “Little Alice fell down a hole, bumped her head and bruised her soul.” The second Alice is blonde and is going for the children at the hospital. She is stronger than all the other robots and can shut them down, she finds Maggie and the kids and is about to kill Maggie before Nick arrives just in time and guns her down in his car (the one he is always fixing up), Maggie pulls him out of the flaming vehicle but he is unresponsive. Too bad because Alice is still moving around and she is creepy crawling right towards Maggie then is trying to choke her out, next thing you know, WHAM, Nick hits her off of Maggie and Maggie stabs her through the brain core. They win the day and love each other again. But back at the lab they plugged in the computers again and someone is waking back up… Roll credits.

----------------------HANNAH WATCHES HORROR---------------------

[thatskenwithac]

I love Sci-Fi and I hope you do to because I highly recommend this show.

[gudgurkan]

A couple of my favourite drawings from 2024!

First off, one of the last drawings I did last year

And one of the earliest

I've worked a lot on the game Esoteric Ebb in 2024. Nessan is one of my favourites!

Another one for Esoteric Ebb I really like is Akzel!

The coolest character I drew for Esoteric Ebb is a secret one though 👀

My Kickstarter campaign for "The Cult of Dreams" was one of the biggest things happening for me in 2024. Thank you to everyone who backed!

Another one from The Cult of Dreams

Yet another!

I dabbled in sci-fi a bit too (looking to do more sci-fi in 2025)

And this!

Alternative history Sweden with airships

Thanks for enjoying what I've drawn in 2024! Let's have a great 2025 🔥

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I really want you to get started on Jurassic Park now after reading your tags.

All right, you asked for it! This post is going to be long because I've been rereading Jurassic Park since I was about 10 years old. But. My thoughts:

Jurassic Park is the oldest story in the world: one about hubris, and the price men pay for their ignorance of nature. From the first moment the protagonists step foot on the island, they can see it. There are poisonous plants next to the pool because they "look pretty." The harbor has no retaining wall because tropical storms aren't considered important. And there's a steep price for that hubris. Wu doesn't bother to learn the dinosaurs' names before breeding them, Nedry ignores them as unprogrammable, Malcolm mansplains them to their own creators, Regis laughs at the idea of them escaping, Hammond relentlessly monetizes them, Arnold insists he can control them... And they all get eaten by dinosaurs. It's the characters with the good sense to be overawed and scared (Muldoon, Gennaro, the paleontologists, the kids) who make it out alive. Almost paradigm.

More specifically, it's a book about the most fundamental principle of engineering: be scared, be confused, and then do something anyway. Then do something else, then something else, until something works. Timmy isn't a master hacker in the book; he's just (unlike Grant) willing to push buttons on the computer until he finds the power grid. Gennaro's still a scaredy cat in the book, but he clenches his teeth and goes into the velociraptor nest anyway. The heroic characters are the ones who conclude someone has to do something, despite not knowing what that something is. The villainous ones are the ones who refuse responsibility.

Speaking of which, can we talk about Ian Malcolm? I'm a sucker for a good Cassandra character, especially one that manages to get even the genre-savvy reader rolling their eyes and going "will you shut up?" And Malcolm is one of the best, every off-putting academic habit rolled into one: He thinks he's better than other people for not liking sports. He brags about not caring about appearances and then comments on Sattler's legs. He assumes Hammond has read his monograph and — when Hammond reveals he hasn't — pulls out a copy that he keeps on his person at all times to have Hammond read on the plane. He smugly explains that other characters should've foreseen they'd be killed by dinosaurs, only to be killed by dinosaurs. He calls his theory the Malcolm Effect. I do love Jeff Goldblum's gentler, more charming take on the character ("See, here, now I'm sitting by myself, talking to myself, that's chaos theory" I say literally every time I ask a question of someone who just left the room). But I prefer the way original Malcolm gets away with being right about everything because we so so badly want him to be wrong.

Speaking of that comment about the legs: by the low low bar of 80s/90s thriller writers, Crichton is surprisingly progressive. Jurassic Park invites us to laugh with (and roll our eyes with) Sattler, every time someone expresses shock the world's top paleobotanist is a woman. The Lost World perfectly captures the "women in STEM have to be twice as competent to get half the respect" dynamic, and it's a story about the male characters over-estimating their own competence as the female ones go about saving the day. Race isn't handled perfectly, but it is discussed in both books. Malcolm's chauvinism is designed to make everything else he says a bitter pill, to poison us against him. Crichton's no feminist. But Sattler's hardiness — later Harding's and Kelly's as well — are shown as hard-won in a world that batters nerdy girls so hard that only the toughest survive.

And Malcolm is just one of the many ways Jurassic Park masterfully lampoons scientific bullshit. After little Tina is bitten by a "strange lizard" and nearly dies from the swelling, Dr. Cruz assures her parents that lizards bite zookeepers all the time, that some people are allergic to lizard venom, and that the lizard Tina drew resembles a basilisk — and then we cut to him talking to his fellow MD. Where we find out that lizards don't attack humans in the wild, no human they know of has ever been hospitalized for a lizard bite, basilisks aren't venomous, and Tina's condition doesn't resemble an allergic reaction. They have no idea what this "lizard" (a Procompsognathus) could be or how it poisoned this kid, but they've been taught to obfuscate rather than admit that. Scientists are arrogant, and ignorant of their ignorance.

But the book is every bit as positive about empiricism as it is negative about individual scientists. The seamless way Crichton blends science fiction with science fact gets me every time. His preface connects Watson & Crick to Swanson & Boyer to Malcolm & Levine, explaining each step of the research process as he goes. He goes on to explain how Genetech developed its ideas from IBM, and that IBM and Genetech both contributed to InGen, which in turn influenced Biosyn, funded by Hamaguri... and only two of those names are fictional, but don't worry about which. Crichton does his homework, and then he presents his homework in the most compelling way of any writer I've ever encountered.

You need no further proof than the technologies — satellite phones, electric cars, touchscreens, gene editing — that were sci fi in 1990, commonplace today. Crichton did the reading. And he rolls that science out ever-so-slowly: dribbling first the mystery of the worker with a 3-foot gash in his torso who claims a bird of prey did it, then the mystery of the resort that needs the world's most powerful data storage, then the mystery of the billionaire who calls in the middle of the night with "urgent" questions about what baby dinosaurs eat... Until even 10-year-old me could look at that picture of a fractal and go "ohhh, I see how the unstable phase shifts of chaos theory explain the fact that a thunderstorm caused that guy to get eaten by a T. rex." Almost paradigm.

And all Jurassic Park's banging on about chaos theory belies a deep understanding of how interconnected ecosystems are. Animals, like plants, like subatomic particles, must be understood holistically. Pretending that the best way to learn the truth of any system is through breaking it down "is like saying scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast is human nature. It's nothing of the sort. It's uniquely Western training." Crichton clearly loves biology: "a single fertilized egg has a 100,000 genes, which act in a coordinated way, switching on and off at specific times, to transform that single cell... A house is simple in comparison. But even so, workmen build the stairs wrong, they put the sink in backward, the tile man doesn't show up when he's supposed to. All kinds of things go wrong. And yet the fly that lands on the workman's lunch is perfect." And he clearly hates what capitalism has done to biotechnology.

Hammond the venture capitalist is a perfectly despicable villain: No dinosaurs have escaped, because I said so. If there are problems, no there aren't. Put on a good show for investors, no matter how many contractors die in the process. Talk about all the "good" the park will do by making tons of money. The kids are stranded and the tech expert's dead? No they're not, because I said so, now pass the ice cream. It's truly a delight watching him get eaten by dinosaurs.

For that matter, Jurassic Park is bursting with details of style over substance. There are cutesy Apatosaurus cutouts in the hotel rooms and bars on the widows, a half-finished restaurant covered in Pterosaur poop, and a celebrity-narrated tour track that can't synchronize with the dinosaurs. It's trying to be Disney World, and it's actually a roadside zoo. The signage — "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth," the hand-lettered "Welcome to Jurassic Park", the room (and department) called "Control" — isn't subtle in its irony. But it is fun.

Which is yet another great sci fi trick. "Our funding is infinite but our peer review sucks" perfectly sets up the blend of the accurate with the plot-fueling (likely why Crichton reuses it several times). Why are there Pterosaurs in a dinosaur park? Our funding is infinite but our peer review sucks. Why are so many Cretaceous dinosaurs in Jurassic Park? Our funding is infinite but our peer review sucks. You didn't know Dilophosaurus is venomous? Our funding is infinite... It's perfect, because it's the opposite of how the scientific process usually works. Again: Crichton knows his shit, and he knows how to communicate it.

Like, even when I'm reading Sphere or Terminal Man — books where I'm perfectly aware I know more than Crichton on the subject, not in the least because their science inevitably became outdated — I still find myself believing, at least for the length of the story. You don't have to suspend disbelief when reading Crichton's work; he hoists it into the stratosphere for you. Half the time he won't give it back even after you're done. Almost paradigm.

But despite all that nerdery, Jurassic Park is still a rocking adventure story that builds momentum until it smashes to its conclusion at 70 miles an hour, ending the millisecond it can do so with not a word of denouement. You can practically hear that last deep piano note on the final words. It's cinematic as hell. This is Crichton post-Westworld, pre-Twister, the ultimate adventure writer. He reads, clearly, avoiding the errors of sci fi amateurs who watch too many movies (the T. rex has a distinctive smell, the island is relentlessly humid, so on) but he knows how to make a tight fast-moving story that you can consume in under three hours. His imagery is powerful, his pacing is on point, and his plot sucks you in and shoots you out like a water slide.

Jurassic Park is fun. It's informative. It makes you laugh, and gasp, and sigh, and think. It has its flaws (Harding Sr. fades out in the 3rd act, Grant's Maiasaura expertise never pays off) but those are minor in a book that stands up so well to rerereading. Almost paradigm.

[yotsubafan420]

Mars Express (2023)

Probably one of my favourite new releases I’ve seen this year. Some really dynamic shots were done with this animation style. I found the world building so fun, like the way the futuristic technology was designed felt applicable to real world scenarios. Reminded me of Bladerunner and Ghost in the Shell movies but it also very much felt like its own story.

This movies from the same guy who did DYE Fantasy and like yeah you go man, keep em coming this was awesome.

[herunseenworlds]

1st quarter readings:

Futuristic violence and fancy suits by Jason Pargin - Insane ideas, interesting characters, violence and funny.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson - A sci-fi classic that is not my favorite.

The first cate in space ate pizza by Mac Barnett - Short and fun reading for a rainy afternoon.

Parable of the sower by Octavia Butler - An eerie fiction too close to reality. Everyone must read!

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor - Great flow, lovely character, just a bit too naive ending.

Wool by Hugh Howey - Loved every single chapter of this book.

Starter villain by John Scalzi - Cats that can communicate with humans, interesting twists and funny scenes.

The dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin - A bit slow, but then it hooks you and when you understand the title your brain explodes.

Merlin’s tour of the universe by Neil deGrasse Tyson - I like the idea of questions and answers but the selection could be better.

Have you read any of these?

[kcdodger]

Starfield: A review by KCDodger.

No game has ever touched me the way Starfield has. I firmly believe that it is Bethesda's greatest product and achievement, but I've been here before. I've explained it many times to many people why Starfield is good, actually… but, will you listen?

Maybe this time it'll be different. Maybe this time I can change things. Maybe not.

Starfield is every bit as good as No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous, or whatever other space game you've spent hours on. In the following overview, I am going to use a series of shapes to represent what each game does, and doesn't have.

Starfield: ⬤ Star Citizen: ■ Elite: Dangerous: ▲ No Man's Sky: ⬧

I need you to trust me when I say that I am being objective about this. Starfield does have its problems, but they have been exaggerated. I really do mean that. So, let's begin.

Interesting Worlds - ⬤ ▲⬧ Well thought out Characters - ⬤ ▲ A good story - ⬤ A thoughtfully constructed universe - ⬤ ■ ▲ ⬧ Good Gunplay - ⬤ Good Piloting - ⬤ ■ ▲⬧ In depth Ship Customization - ⬤ ▲⬧ Replayability - ⬤ ■ ▲⬧ Roleplaying Mechanics - ⬤ Base Building - ⬤ ▲(colonization counts honestly) ⬧ Meaningful Progression - ⬤ ▲⬧ Character Customization - ⬤ ▲ ■ Loading Screens - ⬤ ■ ▲⬧

Starfield's not lacking in any of these.

Worlds

Starfield is rife with beautiful worlds that are absolutely photo-worthy, and all of them are procedurally generated outside of specific instances. If you think Star Citizen's are not procedurally generated, you really may want to think that one over. Core instances are not, but the rest absolutely is. (Probably serverside. But you know not every mountain and field is hand crafted.) Starfield's biggest problem there is that it has such a limited array of POIs and interactions. Yeah, it's really weird to find a cave with bones on Luna, and there really should be measures to prevent that. But, that's what happens when you build a single player game designed to compete with overhuge MMOs. I'd have narrowed Starfield's focus quite a bit were I in charge. Be that as it may, my gallery of amazing sights only grows.

I can not overstate the level of achievement Bethesda managed to pull off here, with Starfield's "Settled Systems". The amount of thought and effort put into each planet's properties, orbits, the ways they interact with each other, it's some really mind boggling stuff. Elite's is easily the best of that, but their engine is designed for it.

Somehow, Starfield did that on Creation. I still do not know how.

Characters

Constellation's cast is fantastic. As is The Vanguard's. The Freestar Rangers are great too. UC Sysdef and Crimson Fleet are if nothing else, memorable, and Ryujin's characters, while honestly odd in the context of a space exploration game, was really good too.

I don't know many characters from Elite. Everything they do happens in the background with no meaningful impact on the world. I've never heard of a character from Star Citizen, and No Man's Sky is anathema to the concept of characters. All three of those games are big open worlds where you and the other players are characters. I know that NPCs you can run into in NMS are apparently memorable, but nobody's ever given me a name.

But I can tell you the story of Sam Coe, a single father who's really struggling with it. I can tell you about Andreja, the displaced member of House Va'ruun. I could go on about Sarah Morgan, a woman who's had a lifetime of adventures in the last decade. Goodness knows I can talk to you about Barrett. That's just four examples. They're very well acted, well thought out, meaningfully interactive characters. They'll call back to actions of yours, things you've said, even their romances feel really good. I'm a very married woman who loves my wife very much, and it's actually quite impressive to me how genuine the acting and presentation of interpersonal relationships feels. Given the game is about how we all effect one another, how we deal with loss, moving on with the world and life, this shouldn't come as a surprise, but the characters of Starfield deserve recognition. I really like them all, even the utter bastards.

Story

Elite doesn't really have a story. It has a developing narrative that the devs guide gently. Yeah, the Thargoid invasion happened and those of us who participated in it had an effect - but to say it's a story is… lacking, I think. Star Citizen wholly lacks one, and frankly I'm not sure what No Man's Sky's is.

Starfield, though? Starfield is about discovering a mystery beyond your comprehension, but you get wrapped up in it. Starfield is about becoming part of something more and meeting new people, about learning who they are and what they've been through. You're likely the youngest gun in Constellation outside of Cora Coe, but your accompanying cast is all in their 30s and 40s, some even beyond that in their 50s and 60s. Walter Stroud is a rare character that way. I know this is the story section, but I have to go off about how aged a majority of the case is. Nobody's truly new to the job, but everyone's going into this mystery unprepared and ill equipped. The characters are all mature, and have beliefs and convictions informed by their lives.

You end up discovering what the story about the artifacts is, what they lead to, why they're being collected. It's a cosmic mystery without much of a definitive answer, but the answer really lies in how it makes you feel. On my main, I won't go into NG+. but going through just one NG+ has left a profound impact on me… and that's not even getting into what happened to me when The Death, occurred.

Few games have made me stop everything to put it all down and cry. Starfield has, and continues to. Fallout can make me sad, The Elder Scrolls can make me think and maybe even be mad, but Starfield can make me cry.

Universe

Elite, NMS, and Star Citizen do all have well thought out universes with factions and characters and gameplay that is informed by it. I won't deny that. It'd be intellectually dishonest to assert otherwise. Elite's is far future and a bit blase to me, Star Citizen's world is… I mean as unfinished as the product, and truth be told I know little about NMS' world. But I do know about Starfield's.

Starfield's world, its universe (and beyond) is a NASA Kid's playground (Hi, that's me! NASA kid! Through and through.) Starfield is for the stargazer. For the kid who wanted to be an astronaut, who wanted to be aboard a space shuttle. Starfield is for that person. It isn't for the person looking for a sci-fi military epic or a huge war, it's about the wonder of space, and the universe informs that. I could go on about the "Set design" of the ships, particularly Nova Galactic's interiors (AUUGGHH SO GOOD), about how the food is all thoughtfully packaged, about how the CHUNKS brand is inspired by existing space foods (technically, it ought to be some kind of hexagonal shape. But a cube of Sauvingon is just… chef's kiss), about how the spacesuits are big, baggy, clunky. About how almost every door is an airlock (even if that IS annoying!). The whole world is built around not just exploring space, but living in it. Which I just… don't get from the other games, who feel Transient by comparison. It's such a shame then, that Starfield's outpost building is quite lackluster.

Gunplay

I can not speak to NMS' gunplay, so I will not. Last I played it, it had about ten weapons or something. Elite: Dangerous' gunplay? Don't even bother, it's hot ass. I'm sorry, but Odyssey's release is seen as the game's lowest point for a reason. Star Citizen's? I've dawdled with it, it's very whatever, fairly standard. Oh, but Starfield…

I love Starfield's gunplay. Oh my goodness. As a shooter, it plays wonderfully. The control you have over your character can be iffy, but actually pointing and shooting feels really good. The best any gunplay in a Bethesda game has ever felt, and given how good Fallout 4's felt, that's actually quite impressive. It's helped quite a bit by how fun and interesting many of the gun designs are (and how bizarre some are. No, there are no square bullets in Starfield, you have been lied to, big surprise.) I will complain that there's definitely a set of guns Bethesda *wants* you to use... but that doesn't mean they aren't all a joy to shoot. Except the Disruptor that thing's feel is just garbage.

Piloting

Every single game on this list has good Space Combat. Elite's is thorough and well thought out, Star Citizen's is fast and arcadey (it is), and No Man's Sky is casually simple, accessible and fun. (It reminds me of Starlink.) and Starfield's is also very simple. It's quite ambitious, though, and it does something that none of the other do. It's not that you can disable ships system by system. It's not that you can enter a VATS-like targeting mode to do so. It's not that you can allocate power ala the old X-Wing games and contemporary sims. It's not that you have full control of your movement in all directions and can even maintain heading while turning. It's that you can do all of that, while near-seamlessly boarding with an enemy craft at any time, once you've taken their engines and shields out. I can't put into words how bonkers that is, dear reader. Because not only can you do all the regular space combat stuff, even if it is SLIGHTLY simplified, but you can use all - all the ground stuff you use, in space, when boarding an enemy ship. You don't enter another map, either. No. Yeah, your ship interior probably deloads, but the battle in space rages on outside. The world outside does not stop existing while you clean out an enemy ship (and if you took out their grav drive, you get to even fight in Zero-G aboard a ship, it's VERY cool!). The world continues. Yes, this is true for Star Citizen. But I'm pretty sure you can't do any of that in No Man's Sky, and Elite is honestly just pathetic this way. No shot has ever been fired aboard a ship in the ten years Elite's been alive, but Starfield's ships are riddled with bulletholes. And you can take them. You can own them. You can do hijacking, piracy, you can scrap the ship for parts, sell it, you can loot the contraband the pirates had - reader, that is not something you can do in any of the other games. Not even Star Citizen, because the mechanics in Starfield work consistently, and it's a finished product. Starfield is not scamming you. I can not emphasize enough how excellent the interplay between ships and the space combat itself is. What's even crazier is you're not glued to your seat. You can just... get up. At any point. No, you can't EVA - that does suck! But you don't really need to at any point, as funny as being a bug on a windshield would be. All of this interacts seamlessly with all those RPG mechanics. It's actually insane to me, and they did this on the engine that powered Morrowind. The one everyone keeps saying that they need to replace. I have no true idea what smoke and mirrors make everything work, but I do know that when my camera's clipped around, there are people walking around in my ship while I am flying in any of those eight degrees I can move in. I'm sure the trick has to do with only one ship having a "Real" interior at a time, but it is actually wild to me that they still got all of that rotating in space realistically within the player's reasonable perception. Starfield also lacks Elite's Engineering and unlike SC, is a finished product so... that puts it into the best here, for me, in this category especially.

Ship Customization

Nobody does it as good as Starfield and I'm going to be blunt. Yeah, you can equip whatever modules you want on the ship frames you buy in Elite, yeah you can tweak the ships in Star Citizen, yeah there are even custom ships you can play with in No Man's Sky now. But every... single part in Starfield, is customizable. Color, rotation, position, no matter what you want you can make it work. It does all get blocky and funnily shaped, but it all works. The habs exist inside and out, the geometry can be walked on, you can fit in the gaps of your ship... You can color your ship, name it, rearrange it any which way you want, you can decorate the interior and it'll stay that way (Gods Forbid you move a window, though, whups.), it's actually insane. The thing is, these ships exist inside and out, fully traversible. Elite cannot do that. NMS only does that with bigger ships. Star Citizen can do that, but it's just not a finished product and what, you buy the ships for actual money? Are you really going to spend ninety dollars for a low-mid grade ship with the paintjob you want? For an unfinished game..? Starfield has none of those problems. Yeah, you have to load into the ship but it's a short load, and the outside world continues to exist. It's a non issue. The customization is out of this world. Now, I will be real. There are issues. You don't have strict control of the doors and ladder placement. That is bad. That must be added. But the customization in this game is genuinely astounding. I can't get enough of it.

Replayability

Starfield has a genuine, narrative driven New Game Plus. It's really cool and it's really good. Anyone who gripes about the fact you lose money and weapons and ships - are sort of missing the point of a NG+ anyway. So long as you like Starfield - any game really - it's very replayable. Are E:D and SC replayable? Well, you can always load them again or start a fresh character, but the persistent universes makes that kind of a doozy. I do know that NMS has a kind of reset once you get to the center of the universe, so if you like NMS, it's very replayable too. But yes. Starfield's replayability is very good. Lots to shoot, lots to loot, lots to do.

Roleplaying Mechanics

Starfield is Bethesda's best Roleplaying game. Elite, NMS and SC, are not Roleplaying Games strictly. You may play a role, but it is not necessarily roleplaying. It's hard to be nonlethal, it's hard to be a talk-first-shoot-later character, but you can flavor your game any number of ways. You can smuggle and trade goods, you can play delivery person, you can play mercenary, bounty hunter, you name it. You can even be a lawman, soldier for hire, any number of things, and there are dialogue options, skills, modifiers, even literal powers, one of which lets you see what the other NPC is GOING to say, to facilitate your style of play. Starfield is a true, honest Roleplaying game. It's one of the most easily accessible space RPGs out there, too. If you want a Space Roleplaying game, it's this one.

Base Building

I will level with you. Starfield has an intricate Base Building system that is honestly needlessly complex but if you really like that kind of thing it's pretty intense. And tedious. Much moreso than Fallout 4's base building and truth be told not nearly as rewarding. It is a step backwards... If only for the reason that you can't build an actual colony. The biggest reason to build an outpost is for infrastructure and manufacturing. To what end? This is one of the moments where I believe the vestigial bones of Starfield comes into play. They wanted fuel to be a mechanic, they wanted outposts to be important, they wanted you to network your way through the settled systems. I am simultaneously glad and sad that these features were left on the cutting room floor, because it would have been really cool, but it also would have been very tedious. There's an entire faction - LIST, they even have a quest that introduces you to them, where their whole thing is about buiding colonies on the fringes of Settled Space... and the game just does nothing with them. It kinda' sucks. I hope they add that stuff someday. I'd like to play a version of Starfield where I do actually need those enormous fuel tanks.

Progression

Every quest has a good end reward. You can level into the actual thousands (though, ~314 is where you're going to have every skill maxed out!), and Starfield is pretty cumulative by nature. So much so, that you can very easily run into long term storage problems. Very few containers have limitless mass (and it's why armor and weapon stands are great, because they can store limitless ammo and a few guns. Great way to reduce mass taken in your cargo hold!). Starfield has an issue with inventory. Everything has weight. Some things are stupidly heavy. It's not the most enjoyable system and will pressure you into building an outpost/depot to store your stuff eventually, but that takes resources and Bethesda saw fit to add the *entire* perodic table into the game as harvestable materials. There are 108 crafting materials in the game, and you can't make guns, armor or clothing and that is honestly bizarre to me. Amazing game with some odd choices. But the character progression really is fantastic. Instead of linear "You do more damage!" perks (it does have those, but it's not all it has), Starfield ends up offering effects, every skill has 4 tiers, and you level those up by completing specific challenges. For instance, to max out stealth to get the most (or anything!) out of your sneak attacks (fun fact, you don't even GET a stealth bar without the stealth skill! Love that.) - you have to get 75 melee sneak attacks. Not kills, fortunately. So you genuinely can't just sit there on your stealth archer stint, you have to learn that melee can do x10 damage if you want that x4 gun sneak attack damage. Roleplaying!!

Character Customization

You've all heard it before. "Fucking Pronouns". Let's cover it. Elite is binary, single body type for each, has a solid face customizer. You basically never see it. Star Citizen has an alright customizer, but you rarely use it. NMS, you are just a helmet. Starfield gives you a huge array of body choices. Wanna' be shredded to shit? Go nuts. Want to be wiry, or really fat? Go crazy. You can get huge. You can customize your gait, you can put on a beard at any time, there's an entire vendor in the game dedicated to letting everybody in the world pay 500 credits (cheap as shit!) to change their ENTIRE body. Good golly holly what a bright future we live in to have such autonomy! Body type, face type, skin color, hair type, voice, pronouns (Those two might be tied together?). He/Him, She/Her, They/Them, you get choices. More than most other games. It doesn't ask you if you're cis or trans, it just asks you what you want to be. Isn't that just... Really nice? That all that matters is who and what you want to be and that can change at any time if you so desire? I love that.

Loading Screens

You. Have. Been. Lied. To. Elite: Dangerous is full of them. Star Citizen is full of them. NMS is full of them. They are all just really good at obscuring it. It just doesn't seem like a loading screen. I know Elite best, so I will talk about it. Leaving your ship? Loading screen. In an elevator? Loading screen. Getting in or out of your SRV? Loading screen. Getting into your ship? Loading screen (with big blue circles, at that!!), jumping to low wake? That is a load. High Wake? That is the biggest loading screen of all. Entering a POI, like a conflict zone? Loading screen. Leaving low orbit? Loading screen. Elite, oft compared to Starfield, literally has more loading screens. In Starfield, you can actually get into your buggy without a loading screen! You can leave it midair, try it, it's really fun! Push comes to shove, you are having loading screen after loading screen thrown at you. In No Man's Sky, when you dock, when you enter orbit, you are loading. It has the least loads of all, but Elite has more. I'm dead serious. Can't speak for Star Citizen, but what's there to load? A broken mission? I flew free for a weekend, and everything I did was broken. Who cares if there's no or low loading screens, if the game won't even load in the first place? No, you can't truly seamlessly fly between worlds, and maybe that does suck. No, you can't seamlessly land, but what difference does it make? You will always land at the POI. Maybe the middle man is important, but Starfield saw fit to cut it out, and perhaps that was the wrong move. But goodness it's honest.

Conclusion

Starfield is it. It is the Space game you wanted. But you have to give it a chance. It's exceptional. Just stop letting yourself be lied to. I have had to tell people the truth of the starfield sandwich so many times, and that lie has damaged the game irrevocably. That's just one example. It's all pendantry, that hurt the game. "Fucking Pronouns" this. "Square bullets" that (lies), "Endless loading screens" ad infinitum (just as many as any other space game. It's just honest.) Play Starfield. There will be parts that frustrate you. There are parts that frustrate me. But Starfield is a comfort game for me. It's a game I love. It's also a game that truly challenges me. It's good. It means so much to me. I have a constellation pin opposite to my pride pins on my leather jacket. I have a Nova Galactic mug that I drink out of regularly. I have a Constellation hat. I'm gonna' get that Constellation wall art piece, and I'm gonna' get my hands on that Chronomark edition someday. (If only I knew, reader.) It's not a 10/10 game for me. It's a strong 8/10. But that missing 2 isn't so bad. To Bethesda Game Studios, thank you for the gift that is Starfield. It'll stay with me forever.

[mysharona1987]

[andreai04]

If there was one thing good about this situation, it was reinforcing how great my decisions to (a) hack my governor module and (b) escape were. Being a SecUnit sucked. I couldn't wait to get back to my wild rogue rampage of hitching rides on bot-piloted transports and watching my serials.

[maa-pix]

Scenes in Regent Street and Piccadilly Henrique Alvim Corrêa, 1906

[hannahwatcheshorror]

THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975)

A classic and interesting horror story starring Katharine Ross and other wonderful actors. My grandmother, mother, and father all agree that this movie was terrifying when they first saw it.

That being said, something about the story just isn’t told in that compelling of a manner, it had trouble keeping my attention. I still enjoyed it though and think it is worth the watch.

⭐⭐⭐.5

Trigger Warning Domestic Abuse

We meet a family leaving the big city to move to a smaller town of Stepford (Joanna, Walter, and their kids). Walter joins the town's men's association but he acts very strange about it, telling Joanna he loves her very much after his first night of joining. Joanna makes a new friend, Bobbie, who read about her in the newspaper, they become fast friends! Walter brings over the men’s association to his home to meet Joanna and she doesn’t get a good first impression of them. She is surprised that Walter likes them at all but he is adamant about the group and fitting into this town. They go to a party and one of the wives starts to act strangely, afterward she comes to Joanna’s house to apologize for some reason. Apparently the boys made her apologize which is pretty wack and Joanna and Bobbie think so too. They decide to try and make their own girls club but none of the other women in town want to join. They are all too busy with their wifely duties! It isn’t until they find a friendship with a woman named Charmaine that they are able to start their club and with Joanna’s intelligence working the men she is able to get the women some time off their chores so they can join the group! The main three (3) want to talk about real things while the rest of the girls just want to talk about chores… 

There used to be a women's group with over fifty (50) members but it disbanded, when Joanna and Bobbie went to get more details on it the old president just says she is happy with her life now, doing chores and keeping house. While out looking for Joanna’s dog, Fred, they notice Charmaine is bulldozing her tennis courts. But that is strange because Charmaine loves tennis. Turns out her husband hated it so she let him bulldoze it and she was all creepy calm about it. Joanna and Bobbie look on while Charmaine talks about this wonderful weekend she had with her husband that just did her right and made her want to please him. The whole thing is wack. Bobbie begins to think there is something in the water and she starts to gather some semi-credible evidence. They decide they need a scientist to test the water and Joanna happens to know one who she dated about twelve (12) years ago. They show up out of the blue and he just says he will help them. Neat! There is nothing in the water, though! Bobbie and Joanna (respectfully) want to move out of Stepford anyway. Joanna talks to Walter that night about leaving and he agrees, just says it will take some time, but Joanna is so happy she doesn’t care how long it will take.

Later, Joanna slips that the dog is dead, meaning they never did find him. Joanna visits Bobbie to tell her the good news but Bobbie’s house is perfectly clean and Bobbie isn’t acting like herself. Nearly injuring herself running home to tell Walter, Joanna wants to move the date of the move up. Walter thinks that Joanna is crazy and wants her to see a psychiatrist. At her psychiatrist Joanna tells the truth like it is and her psychiatrist suggests that she takes the kids and runs away. That night when Joanna is attempting to do just that she finds that Walter has sent the kids to a friend’s house. When Joanna tries to assert herself Walter grabs her and fights with her. She runs away to Bobbie’s house hoping that she can talk any sense into her this time. While yelling at Bobbie, Joanna cuts herself with a knife claiming that she bleeds and asks if Bobbie does too. This question results in Bobbie getting stabbed in the gut (ouch). But Bobbie does not bleed! In fact she pulls the knife out of her and then malfunctions in her kitchen like a robot… Yikes. Joanna returns home and bludgeons Walter with a fire poker and demands to know where the kids are. He tells her they are at the association. She goes there (with her iron fire poker) and tries to find her crying kids, turns out it is just a recording. The head of the association is there. He talks to her, gets her poker, chases her to a room that has Fred in it! But, wait, who is that in the back with the black eyes and perfect tits? It is Joanna’s robot replacement! And she kills Joanna! The next scene we see is all the ladies shopping at the store like perfect little robots, Joanna walking blank eyed because it is no longer Joanna. Sad!

-----------------------HANNAH WATCHES HORROR--------------------

[elizabethisreading]

Okay, just saw Mickey 17. Spoilery thoughts:

-Changing the reason for Mickey taking the Expendable job from Berto-encouraged sports betting to a failed macaroon business is...a funny and interesting change.

-I know Seven and Eight had different personalities in the book as well, with Eight being less frightened and uptight than Seven. But I don't remember Eight being as cold-blooded and mean in the book compared to the movie.

-I don’t like how they changed Alan Manikova‘s backstory. Making him a “psychopathic serial killer” is boring compared to the more wild and philosophical backstory he has in the book.

-Is Kai supposed to be Cat from the book? Because if so...they replaced an Asian woman character with a white lady...okay🤨.

-On that note, if Kai is a Cat replacement, she's not a good one. Kai's relationship with Mickey is rushed and forced compared to Cat and Mickey in the book. Also! Cat and Mickey never got together romantically or sexually! They were actually a pretty solid example of a well-written platonic relationship between a male and female character!

-I don't like the catty fighting over Mickey that Nasha and Kai do. It felt pointless, and I didn't care enough about Kai to be invested in it. It's especially annoying is Kay is meant to be Cat. Because in the book, Cat and Nasha don't interact much, and when they do, they get along fine! I think I even recall them joking together about sharing Mickey. There was no dumb "fighting over a guy" nonsense!

-I wish we could have heard Nasha and Mickey first conversation after they meet. She doesn't have a word of dialogue until after their sexy montage. I wish we could have had a moment to get to know her first.

-That being said, I like how Nasha had more "action" moments than I recall from the book. By that I mean more scenes where she's proactively moving the plot forward. She's super badass, definitely one of my favorite characters in both versions.

-The threeway scene: I joke about wanting Bong to "expand" the off-page scene from the book, but I didn't actually expect like...a full-on porno scene. The only thing about the scene that bothered me was that, unlike the book, they were high on drugs when they decide to do it. Mickey tells Nasha she's, "Not acting like herself." This is a small thing but I don't like it. I liked it better in the book, where Nasha just took what she wanted and didn't need to be under the influence to want to fuck two clones.

-I'm a tad disappointed we didn't get the moment where Nasha kisses both Mickeys in front of a Natalist officer after they're caught and tells him to "suck it." That was such a funny "good for her" moment for Nasha, I wanted to see it.

-THE BABY CREEPERS ARE SO CUTE🥺

-ALSO THE BABY CREEPERS STEALING MICKEY'S MACHETE AND FIGHTING OVER IT

-Love Mickey helping Nasha put on her uniforms and adjusting her clothes like the good little househusband that he is.

-The Trump/Trump supporter analogs were a bit on the nose but hey in the age of declining media literacy maybe it's fine if subtly takes a back seat sometimes.

-Toni Collette is a great actress and her performance is great, but her character felt stereotypical in a way that made her less interesting than the rest of the cast.

~

Overall, despite my complaints, it's a solid and fun movie. The satire is often blunt, and I don't think it's as deft as Parasite. It's more action-y than the book and more Hollywood-y than Parasite. But still, great performances, funny dark humor, and a compelling world.

I like the book better, but the movie is certainly worth a watch too.

[bonnibelleangelica]

Wanna Be My Test Reader?

DM me your email address rn and I’ll send you the first 10 chapters of my book. All you have to do is read and tell me what you liked.

(free book bro, how can u pass that up?)

She’s romantic, she’s scientifically accurate (kinda) and she’s autism coded as fuck. Dytopian? You know it.

[sombredancer]

Dark (2017-2020, Netflix)

Just rewatched Dark and I`m in love and in pain, pain, PAIN...

Beware of being heavily spoiled ahead.

The first painful question: would you save your father from sufferings, if it would mean for you to be erased from existence for good? (From this question on started my love for this show).

The second question: is it really wrong, to love someone you shouldn`t love? Will it cause the end of the world?

The desperate abduction. Oh, it was so beautiful!

The third question: will you really be happy with the truth about a time loop that you helped to build with your own hands, when you are able to see the whole picture?

At the end I felt sorry even for him. The fourth question: how does it feel, to try so hard to change your doom and save your loved ones, only to find out that you are the source of their most unbearable pain?

"You are a too good man. Always was. This world didn't deserve you." It's a story about an infinite pain of each and every character: Katharina, Ulrich, Claudia and H.G. Tannhaus, who loved their relatives too much; Hannah, who loved herself too much; Jonas, Mikkel, Martha, Hanno, Charlotte, Elisabeth, Peter, Egon and Helge, who fell victims of the time-travel paradox. It's funny that an insane love for a child launched this glitch in a matrix and another insane love for a child put it all to the end. A circle closed. Poetic.

The fifth question: would you fix the error in a matrix by self-sacrifice, if it would delete you and half of your nearest and dearest from existence but ends the never-ending circle of pain for others?

"We match perfectly. Never believe in anything else."

"The light glitched, there was a loud crack and then everything went dark. And somehow the world came to an end. There was dark and the light never came again. I had such a peculiar feeling like it was for the best. Like it was finally over. Like one was finally free from everything. Nothing to wish. Nothing to be obliged to do. An eternal dark. No yesterday. No now. No tomorrow. Nothing."

Finally, I should say that I'm very grateful to Germans for this series. I watched it in original in order to train my German AND because it was a very-very interesting show. Even when I watched it for the second time. One time is surely not enough for understanding of the plot, trust me.

[omnybus]

I just finished watching The Electric State on Netflix, definitely going to check out the book it’s based on. Not too crazy about the story- it’s not bad, it just has a lot of cliché “do robots have souls”/“man vs. tech” themes I’ve seen a million times before in other sci-fi movies that it doesn’t really do any new with - but I really like all the robot designs, which was always the main draw for me, as it was for the original illustrations by Simon Stålenhag.

I will say that probably the most annoying thing for me about The Electric State is something that has always annoyed me about a lot of gunfighting scenes from movies and TV, and that’s how too often characters only survive them because another gunfighter just… doesn’t shoot them, even when they have nothing physically or motivationally stopping them from doing so. There’s even more than one example where someone with a gun just runs up and seemingly attempts to tackle their opponent instead of shooting them, and gets knocked on their ass as a result. I know gunfights in film are hardly ever realistic, but there’s a difference between forsaking realism to be more dramatic and forsaking it to maintain plot armor.

[franticvampirereads]

I loved this book so much. It was filled with all the political space drama I could ever want and just as much action to balance it out. I loved that Tennal was such a mess for most of the book and that Surit was his exact opposite. I loved when they argued, I loved when they were maliciously compliant with the law and also when they went rogue, and I loved when they became each other’s safe harbor. The other thing that I loved was that Tennal and Surit were both self sacrificing idiots in love. This was such a good read and I really want more of this complicated universe. Ocean’s Echo is getting five stars!