I never said it was. See, rare as it may seem, some people apologize or say they’re sorry when they are part of a situation that they’d prefer never happened, even if they weren’t responsible for any actual injury and would still do the same things, because that’s how nice people do. This does not make the apology…

He’s not apologizing for asking the question, he’s decently apologizing for the media furor it caused, because all he wanted was an answer, not to become the story. That DeSantis’ team then Streisand-ed the situation is not his fault.

Just because the centrist “middle” has always been prepared to tolerate the monstrosities of our time (or any time) is a pretty bad reason to stop giving a shit about things that you know are wrong.

I think Martin Luther King said something about that, actually.

You and I tussled over the quality of the Mandalorian in the original reviews, but man if I haven’t come over to your side, especially on the points you’ve just made. The first season worked so well as its own thing, but as SOON as they started tying it into the Filoni mythology (i.e. as soon as the Darksaber appeared…

“Speaking of misremembering, I’m amused Barsanti wonders about the hyperspace tracking here in reference to Last Jedi but seems to have completely forgotten how the Empire tracks the Falcon in the original movie.”

I was waiting for someone to mention this. It’s not like it’s the entire reason the third act of one of…

Yeah, the outrage over the Secret Invasion credits seems incredibly manufactured for clicks. They pretty much said “We used AI because we saw Google try to understand a frog gif, and it horrified us, because AI translations of moving images creates eerie unreal and almost amateurish pseudo-replications of reality, and…

The verified sources are their shareholder meetings, but ALSO their tax returns, which often say very, very different things, because positive makes money at the former, and negative makes money on the latter. Labor gets stuck in the middle, often hearing the former but getting pointed towards the latter as reason why…

I don’t dispute the rosiest possible outlook being put forth in shareholder meetings. The problem is that, using the exact same numbers, they’ll argue one thing to their shareholders and another to labor and regulators. Being unaware of this phenomenon seems fairly naive. I mean, it’s pretty much the model Trump…

“A loss”, in the sense of liberally reworked numbers bullshitted up for tax purposes. Part of the strikes is that we don’t actually know what shows push subscribers, nor the calculations by which the studios make these decisions, because the studios, unlike those putative steel plants, are not required by law to…

So, I get how this is popular to say to anything dumb, but the point of the Dunning-Kruger observation is that EVERYONE does this to an extent. That people in general think they know more than they do about any subject they are neither completely novice nor expert in.

The problem is that privileged white Americans,…

The American “center” isn’t actually anything. It’s mostly pusillanimous whiners who think votes should just be about putatively innocuous ivory tower economic debate and not the consequences of those votes on the planet. Cowards who think voting Libertarian or Green is intellectual bravery that absolves them of any re…

But it’s worth discussing the failed rolls that DON’T lead to those alternate options, especially in the context of the many other times the game does things right.

A-minuses are always more galling than C-pluses. The game PROVED it’s capable of being interesting in this way, and so when it isn’t, it’s jarring.

Except for all the mundane and even extraordinary actions where there are no dice involved. There are many actions that all reasonable DMs, module developers, and CRPG developers don’t even leave up to dice, for reasons of pacing, nuance, or assisting the narrative’s consistency. Where that line is is of course…

I think you’ve accidentally made the article writer’s point for them. You’ve pointed out that in 5e there are places where the DM can in fact decide that the player shouldn’t have to roll at all. That IS deciding that there’s nothing “interesting” in the potential for failure at that point. Indeed, that’s why the…

There are definitely some quests that seem like the next step is somewhere else, when the next step is actually right next to you in the same room. Especially because there’s certain container objects on the ground that reveal themselves with the “highlight items” and some that do not.

The “investigate Kagha” part of…

The other part of this is that “where are you from” might be answered with some precision (if also some work) over the centuries if you’re an American whose ancestors are from Europe or Asia. Many Black people’s family trees unfortunately begin with their ancestors’ enslavements, the records of their previous identity…

Agree on Covenant, but...

...oof, Prometheus perfectly solid, above 3 and 4? It is at-best mediocre. It is constantly undermined by inconsistent and inchoate characterization, things that happen only so certain scenes (mostly action or suspense) can follow and not because of any sense of logic, and trying-yet-failing…

“ it’s “you have never been taught you made the world do this to you so stop acting like victims”.”

Bruh, that’s like saying 9/11 was deserved because of American adventurism in the Middle East. Even if there were causes, people don’t “deserve” to die in horrible terrifying ways as a response.

We were a colonialist…

“Criticizing McDonald’s for the Iraq Invasion” was the exact metaphor I was looking for here.