Bjorn

Yeah, that immediately occurred to me as well. Bobby and Mike come off as so incredibly unhinged in that scene (and in the original pilot in general).

I think I may ultimately end up quitting this without finishing it because of one of the things I liked about it so much. The fact that power ups both degrade and serve as your primary healing by consuming them means that there's a bit of an opposite arc compared to many roguelikes. Rather than starting weak and building in strength, the optimum run sees you starting fully loaded, and steadily decreasing in power through a run. As a concept I love this! It creates a kind of time pressure to finish a run before all your cards burn out, leaving you suddenly very fragile while in the hardest level. Unfortunately there's no easy to way restock. You can hold up to 100 items, but the only ways to get cards in the hub are to buy them from a vendor 3 at a time (which you can reset, but it takes maybe 10-15 seconds to force the reset), or farm a slot machine, which doesn't produce cards any faster than resetting the vendor. The slot machine cards appear to be of random quality. The vendor's cards match the last level of the castle you reached (doesn't matter if you died or left voluntarily). The debilitating thing is that I ended up having 3 failed runs in a row. First death was on the final level. The next two deaths were both on the first level. All my stockpiled cards are gone. Many of my stockpiled weapons are gone. My vendor is reset to the weakest cards. And I have no money. The only real option is to let the idle clicker portion run in the background for an hour or two to build up a bunch of money, and then manually spend the better part of maybe 20-30 minutes restocking all my lost goods. It's just frustrating that restocking between failed runs is such an onerous chore, and just jumping in without being well stocked doesn't feel like a valid path. The devs likely thought it would feel like cheating or cheap or something to easily let players fully restock between runs. But by making it a chore, it disincentivizes even continuing playing at all, since the exact same pattern might happen again. Which, the game does describe itself as nihilistic, so perhaps it is all intentional.

My mother was diagnosed with dementia last year, and it's been progressing at a faster than normal rate. Like, she's still 70-80 percent "there" most of the times, but this entire season has had me thinking about the relationship between Dougie and dementia/Alzheimer's, the way people relate to him, etc.

Big Ed lighting the paper gave me a ton of anxiety, because I was afraid that he was going to set the Gas Farm on fire and burn it down while he sat in the middle drinking his RR soup, even though that doesn't really feel like his character.

I don't remember if the text gave a specific about where "the farm" was (I just remember Montana). But TP is in the north eastern corner of Washington, walking distance to the Utah state line. It's only a 3 hour drive from Spokane to Missoula, MT.

I'm pretty sure you hear the chime/music that has previously heralded the Black Lodge guiding Dougie as he walked up to the back of Anthony.

I don't think there's been anything to point towards either of the actresses who played Donna returning, so unless it's a hell of a secret, I don't think we'll be seeing her.

I was one of the ones rather lukewarm on last week, and I loved this week from start to finish This show is a roller coaster. More general thoughts: This episode was packed, so many good scenes with so much going on, from the fun and goofy of the conga opening to the upsetting looping boxing match at Palmer's house. I really liked the RR scene, perhaps because it had little to nothing to do with the overall plot. Just good to see more of these characters, and another old timer just dropped in with no fanfare. Big Ed is both incredibly sad, but also very believable. Healthy romantic relationships were never exactly his strong suit, so a life where he and Norma end up splitting but remaining friends is believable. And while she's expanding her business (with some concerns), the Gas Farm hasn't changed at all. I had been hoping that the only James scene we were ever going to get was the "He's still cool" one, but I'll take him showing up again to sing that song. I don't think anyone's mentioned it yet, but Richard Horne showing up at the end of the BadCoop scenes was unexpected.

I don't think that's a particularly interesting question, because that's not how it happened and both of us would answer it in ways that were satisfying to us rather than addressing what the show presented. There's an infinite number of hypothetical "what if" questions that could be asked about this season.

He was impatient by letting the girl he liked into the restricted room, and then impatient by getting all sexy with her rather than waiting to do so not sitting in front of creepy glass box. As long as he was showing patience, he was fine.

Hahaha, well, that was something. I noticed that as well, the show bounces around between using generic brands and real brands, and it's hard to tell if there's any rhyme or reason to it. I saw on reddit as well in the grocery store scene that there's a Big Red sign that's blocked in such a way that it looks like Big Ed.

Our general attitude raising our daughter is that she was always welcome to challenge our rules, but she had to be able to make a convincing argument. It couldn't just be, "Well I want this thing," she needed to be able to communicate her emotions and experiences better than that. Although sometimes, "I want to feel like I'm fitting in with my friends" was actually a good enough reason for us, because fitting in with your peers matters sometimes.

I think the show is intended to take place 25 years after the original. I don't think any specific years have been mentioned, but a couple of people have referred to 25 years. So that would make it 2014. S1/S2 take place over the span of a few months in spring of 1989.

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone once wrote a book in which he gleefully recounts sexually harassing women employees and his co-author gleefully recounts raping, harassing and threatening women while the two of them ran a newspaper in Moscow. I've liked Taibbi's work over the years well enough, but I'm fucking done with him and Rolling Stone for having employed him. It's not like this is some rumor shit or anything, they literally published a book recounting all the awful shit they did while in Moscow.

I Built My Own Godd*mn Castle is a really great essay about the importance and power of representation in media. It's written by the Guest Editor-in-Chief of the currently being crowdfunded Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction (which has already met its funding goal but has weeks left).

I was curious because I couldn't honestly recall. I don't think that's a rotary phone, but it is an old style push button phone (looks like a rectangle of buttons in the middle to me). It's slightly out of place, but nothing close to the office in Audrey's scene. Edited to add: The video clip I pulled that from.

I'm not building some grand concept here, I haven't put anymore thought into it other than my first post on it. I just think that the out of timeness of the technology in the room and some of the other trappings of the scene stand out as feeling potentially within in a dream.

A woman named Cooper gave birth to a kid after spending most of the pregnancy in a coma. It would be incredibly rare, but it would also fit within the Soap Opera aesthetic of TP. Edited to add: I just googled whether or not a woman could carry to term while in a coma, and that story was the first one to pop up. Just kind of a weird coincidence that a woman named Cooper is the first example I found.

The more I was thinking about the details of this scene this morning, the more I give the idea of her still being in a coma or this being some kind of dream sequence some credence. There's the "out of time" feel that it has. Husband is using a rotary phone, doing a bunch of paperwork by hand and has an old school contact book. Of course within the quirkiness of TP characters, it's possible this is just the way the guy prefers to live. But we've seen stuff like Truman and Doc Hayward skyping. Audrey's scene doesn't feel quirky, it feels like it was literally set in another time. And it had the melodrama of a soap opera, like trapped in her own head, she's still living out some kind of melodramatic weird fantasy. Then there's the whole thing of Audrey not having been mentioned at all so far by any of her family. Truman goes to see Ben, rather than Audrey. The reasoning is to get Ben to pay for the woman's medical care, but still, you would generally think that a guy's mother might also be notified. Richard violently attacks Grandma, and no one warns Audrey that her son is on a rampage. Given the dysfunctional nature of the Hornes, again it's possible that none of them are talking to Audrey. Audrey has literally felt missing from the whole show, and here she shows up, but it's all wrong and out of place. Ultimately maybe it is all taking place in the real world, but it does seem like it's well set up to be something else as well.

Yeah, Chuck being Richard is the only thing I could come up with, but it feels like a real stretch that that's what she meant. Ben elected to not tell the Truman about Richard's assault on grandma. I'm sharing the sentiments so far on this one, that it's one of the weakest episodes. A few highlight moments, but a lot of other time spent that just didn't feel like it was hitting the mark for me. "I really worry about you sometimes Albert" was my solid laugh out loud moment, although by and large that scene was a miss for me. I'm assuming the french woman is a sex worker and it was drawn out to show Albert's discomfort. I can't quite put my finger on what I found wrong with it though, because all the component parts I'm fine with.

If you haven't done any reading on the impact that NotLD had in its time, it's worth doing to appreciate its role in history and culture beyond just having zombies. The level of violence and gore in it set the stage for today's gore porn horror, and at the time challenged what was even considered within protected 1st Amendment expression in the US. A black protagonist in a film that wasn't explicitly about race was still a rarity. All in all it's just really interesting how many different things intersected in that one film.

FWIW, this is on Netflix streaming now if people hadn't seen it (like we hadn't). This was kind of a fine in the moment action flick, but it's really not a good movie. This and the other new Star Wars movies just end up feeling so empty for how frenetically busy and non-stop they are. They never take a real moment to just breathe and enjoy the characters or scenery. I just watched it last night, and I think I can only remember one of the new character's names. It all just flies by. I had also presumed that this would be more like a stealth/spy movie, not a giant galactic battle with Darth Vader and shit running around. I just don't think I care at all about Star Wars anymore. Like I'll probably watch them once they hit streaming services and I want to just chill for an evening. But it's impossible to get excited for them now.

Yah! Congrats Patrick!

I finished this up tonight, and I see what you mean about multiple playthroughs. With both the other DRs, I was ready to restart right away after finishing, usually to take a shot at some of the harder challenges or saving everyone, or whatever. But none of the PP Trials are interesting at all, I saved all the survivors the first time, so it would just be rushing through the story on Nightmare, which doesn't sound all that appealing. Still though, totes worth playing once and I had a bunch of fun with it. Sadly DR4 sounds like a train wreck. Continuing to simplify stuff down to just being an untimed open world game where you buy stuff from merchants for currency, just like every other open world game.

I'm pretty okay (at this point, the actual end may change my mind naturally) if the show were to wrap up with many or most threads unresolved, and there being no Season 4. The reality is that's most of all television for me already. I've finished, maybe 3 total television series in the last decade (and all I can for sure name are BSG and Penny Dreadful). Every other show I've started I've stopped, lost interest, it got canceled, or whatever. A series stopping, and being unresolved for me, is the natural state of television. And honestly, I find the ends of most television runs to be disappointing anyways, because wrapping stories in a way that I find satisfying on television seems to be damn near impossible. So as long as the journey to the end is satisfying, that's good enough for me.