Nacarbac [any]

If it’s just a remake of Civil War, but everyone is dipped in gold leaf, half the soldiers are Really Very Big, the white house is like the Mines of Moria after a jetwash, the president is the size of an oil tanker, and the photographers are actually making magic paintings, it’ll be a masterpiece.

Edit: and to step closer to the lathe, the story is told by the descriptions on each Elden Ring themed snack you can get from the concessions. Radahn Rum Punch, Malenia Mint (and blue cheese) popcorn, blah blah blah.

Shadows of the Erdtree, the DLC, is noteworthy for actually having a plot where things happen.

Even then I’d say it’s still a pretty weak plot, and the delivery is awkwardly struggling against their usual style. Which is still an improvement Elden Ring desperately needed, and understandable when I have no doubt the direct writing style has suffered some atrophy.

Huh, saying that has actually made me a bit more optimistic for this adaptation, since they do show a consistent desire to improve and experiment. Not for the adaptation itself, but it might be a good learning experience if there’s a lot of back-and-forth with A24?

Garth Marenghi never said a goddamn thing wrong in his entire life.

It was always really inconsistent. Some authors treated Alignment as “just kinda your vibe”, some as “a combination of cultural factors and divine meddling”, and some as “intrinsic cosmic morals”, some both but for different things (humans vs Outsiders, etc). Negative Energy and undead as being an Eeeeevil Spookyforce or Basically Just Radiation.

That kind of unaddressed inconsistency fuelled, and still fuels, endless repeats of the “Is Necromancy evil? What if my skeletons are used as agricultural robots to allow for a higher standard of living?”, where everyone talks past each other based on what part of the texts they read and settings they play in.

Check out the fan comic. I remember it being “rad as hell”. The archive links seem to work okay - it’s also on their deviantart, but that interface seemed appalling.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150211002826/http://www.snowflamecomic.com/?comic=snowflame-01-01

The STALKER film is absolutely worth a watch, but it has even less in common with the games!

Lord of the Mysteries is being adapted, and that’s a kinda Bloodborne-y setting and story. It’ll be huge over here.

It happens, and it wasn’t your fault. Microsoft software is like an evil pearl - a tiny kernel of functionality wrapped in protective layers of insulting bullshit.

I have a folder on OneDrive named FUCK ONEDRIVE. I created it after hours of panic as I couldn’t find my writing folders, or their backups, and I now cannot delete it. Luckily I found the folders in a parallel backup structure made so it could roughly interface with a different program.

I don’t know necessarily that a tree is actually sentient but if we seriously consider it, perhaps that might lead to better environmental conservation practices as a matter of ethics.

They most likely are not sentient, as we currently understand or can perceive, though the complexity of the networks formed within a forest might, might, allow for something like it in aggregate. Consciousness is deeply strange, for something that should be so familiar.

But as Angel says, here it’s just a paralytic deflection. Like saying that eating plants is stealing from the animals that could eat them, therefore we’re already sinners, therefore we might as well sin some more.

I guess they finally decided to go harder on the Earth Defence Force angle.

I think the text is misrepresenting - he didn’t specify humanoid in the quote. But running with it to try and speculate, hm, a humanoid bodyplan would be compatible with (the few) existing technologies and infrastructure - and as long as it isn’t limited to following human functionality for the limbs (especially in space or underwater) then it’s just a multiarmed drone that happens to fit in an acceleration couch or whatever. Not sure that’s enough of a benefit unless you intend actual humans to follow after.

I guess it’d also be a good visual stunt to have a humanoid do stuff? At least for orbital and underwater stuff it could even be teleoperated in an immersive VR style - signal lag would make it a bit dreamlike, but having a humanoid automata build a sandcastle on the Moon or explore a habitat being printed by specialised drones would be extremely cool.

Instant-blindness lasers are really easy… but pretty much uncontrollable and unpredictable. They’d end up dazzling each other and knocking their own planes out of the sky.

Lasers that are actually lethal would be about ten thousand times worse, even handwaving the incredible technical challenges.

Yeah, I tried to use it a bit for my own mid-30’s MSc, and it was useful in the sense that it produced a terrible paragraph with some structure which I could then viciously edit into something new - decent at fixing grammar and finding words-for-things though. But that’s not too different from my earlier method of “just mash keys wildly and passionately and then go back over to edit out the sedition and most of the swearing”.

The making up sources thing was interesting however, because what it reaaaaally did was put me onto the trick of following up the sources of my enemies, which very often revealed the dishonest cherry picking and outright misrepresentation involved, even in pretty Serious Works.

As an aside I do think it’s good to get some experience with an LLM’s output even if - especially if - you’re against them, because it gives you a sense for them. I hear a very distinct and kinda annoying “chirpy ironic” voice in my head when reading LLM output, from my subconscious doing the analysis. Not totally reliable, I’m sure, but feels helpful.

Please don’t put spoilers in titles.

tl;dr - a superhero does nothing, very loudly.

Though at least Hammond was treated with the contempt he deserved.

Various spoilers.

Yeah, it’s pretty silly. His backstory was probably near or at Epic level

I think pretty much all the character’s backgrounds were a poor choice on their part. You don’t need a shred of backstory upfront if the writing is up to snuff, and having theirs be so high-level kinda makes everything happening pretty low stakes - the intro cinematic with the spelljammer vs dragonriders is basically a level 20 action sequence, and then you’re slogging through mud and goblins hearing about how cool everyone else used to be, having just seen how cool the stuff you don’t get to do is.

Plus Elminster could genuinely solve all of it in about three hours, so he shouldn’t have even been there to say:

Then teleport away without doing anything about it.

But eh, the story and stakes are all over the place.

It’s… like the Battle Angel Alita movie. It likes the source material too much, so it crams in too many elements from much later and weakens itself in the process. Or perhaps the poison of escalation.

Life in plastic, it’s fantastic. Plastic in life, it’s… blithe?

I am not good at this, I have a spoon in my brain.