5 seasons. No more, no less. It gives the overarching story enough room to breathe and play out a solid three act structure with a wide middle. It needs to all be written and plotted out before anything gets filmed.

I agree with all the other people in this thread mentioning ‘In Time’. It had such a great premise, and I didn’t even hate the execution, but it was mediocre. It was like they went 50% of the way to a flawless execution and just said “fuck it, that’s good enough”. The concept has a lot of elements to explore, like classism, labor exploitation, human rights, even free will to a point… A movie just isn’t the right vehicle for that story. It needs to be a series. Done right, you could explore all that while having an overarching plotline, and still have your weekly subplots and B stories. That would give the story time to fully develop the romantic connection between the poor guy who comes into a bunch of time, and the rich girl who empathizes with him. That romance felt incredibly rushed in the movie, but you could build it up over a whole season in a show.

I also want to mention another movie that I’m not sure belongs here. It’s not a bad movie, nor do I think the execution was mediocre, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why it didn’t do better. That movie is called ‘Push’, with Chris Evans and Dakota Fanning. I just watched it again the other night, and I freaking love it. The concept isn’t that amazing or original, but the way they present it is great. There isn’t a ton of exposition or world-building. They kinda just drop you in and let you figure it out, and I really like that. Evans and Fanning have great onscreen chemistry, and Djimon Honsou is a perfect bad guy. This is another one where I think it would make a great series, even though I think the movie was done really well. It’s just kind of a perfect mid-budget sci-fi action movie, and we don’t seem to get those anymore.

I have a lot of thoughts on this game.

First, the production and release of the game itself was like a living metaphor about how corpo assholes ruin everything good. It was obviously rushed for the Christmas release when they clearly weren’t anywhere near finishing the game. I think they could’ve used another solid year, but no, the suits upstairs needed you to hand over those holiday eddies ASAP. Everyone knows about the bugs, so I don’t need to go into that. My biggest complaint about the gameplay is that 90% of the dialog choices really don’t feel like they have any substantial impact on the story overall.

Complaints aside, it is one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played, and probably the best designed open world in any game, in my opinion. Night City really feels lived-in. The city itself is a character in the game, not just a backdrop. The different neighborhoods and districts all feel very unique without feeling like that uniqueness is forced. It just makes sense, and works really well. One improvement I think Night City could use would be more substantial random events happening independently of the player, instead of people just milling around. Like rock concerts, protests/riots, car meetups, parades, stuff like that. Not a big deal without them, but would be a big improvement, in my opinion.

The characters are also great. Judy and Misty are my favorites, and I wish there was a lot more story (or even side quests) with Misty. They are well written and have depth and their own motivations, and their stories were emotionally impactful. But all the characters are well done, and they provide a great experience, even when the main story itself feels thin at times.

Overall, I love the game. It’s been a while since I played through it, so I might go check out the mods and see if anything catches my eye for my next play through.

Alternatively, the number of fistfights I’ve almost been in with Albanians who aggressively refuse to let me pay for anything is off the charts.

Similar. Main difference being the SRA actually believes in the thing their org is built on.

You can draw a straight line from folk music to the birth of metal. They use a lot of the same melodies and structures, and they’re both often built around storytelling and symbolism. Before the metal gatekeepers jump on me with “but but but most metal has a classical influence”, what we call “classical music” is heavily influenced by European folk music. Over time it just became more complex and incorporated more instruments and so on. Classical is just fancypants folk.

The reason folk music blends so well with metal is the same reason classical music blends so well with metal: The common ancestor of both classical and metal is folk.

Here’s some Black Metal for you. Arka’n Asrafokor from Togo, West Africa.

I mean, that is very cool, but there is nothing to support the claim that Satan has ever whispered any such thing.

I was 24. People started panic-purchasing guns and ammunition the minute the whole Y2K story broke. Here’s a CBS News segment from 1999 about it. Here’s a DOJ paper about it. Background checks shot up 15% from the previous year, with over a million background checks in December 1999 alone.

It turned out to be a huge nothingburger with no riots, no looting, no violence… But there was definitely panic, at least in the sense that a lot of people were prepping for some kind of apocalyptic outcome “just in case”. Once the clocks rolled over and people saw that planes weren’t falling out of the sky and nukes weren’t auto-launching, they realized it was a bunch of over-hyped media nonsense.

Prohibition of vice does not work and only empowers organized crime.

End of argument.

My high school had a fallout shelter. I had English classes down there.

Any mention of “family” and I’m out. You aren’t my fucking family. I barely tolerate any of you, and I only go that far because I am forced to participate in this bullshit just so I can feed and shelter myself. Just give me my project, shut your dick sheath, and let me grind my life away in silence.

On a totally unrelated note, “team player”.

Whenever I meet a fellow Gen X in the wild, they seem to fall into one of two categories. If they were born before the end of the Vietnam War, they are upper middle-class douchebags who film anti-woke TokTok videos in their Dodge Rams. If they were born after the end of the Vietnam War, they are solidly working-class and just quietly depressed about everything.

I’m obviously generalizing here, but older Gen X does seem to be far more Boomerish, and younger Gen X is just… Lost.

but I would assume that this only applied to a few old systems?

You might be shocked at how much of our infrastructure ran on those old systems. But thankfully, yes, the rest of your comment is exactly what happened. Programmers knew what was up, and jumped on the problem early enough to avoid any major issues. However, this didn’t stop the media from selling panic for ratings, which became the worst part of the entire Y2K experience. If you’ve ever seen the 1995 movie ‘Strange Days’ with Ralph Fiennes (and a great cast overall), it’s only a slight exaggeration of what the media was hyping for Y2K.

The panic it caused was the worst part of it, which was largely overblown by the media who kept predicting major crashes that would cause riots.

Gen X checking in. Here’s a list of world crises just in my lifetime. This is by no means a comprehensive list:

1975 - 1990: Lebanese Civil War
1976: Tangshan earthquake (China) - 242,000+ deaths
1979 - 1989: Soviet-Afghan War
1979: Three Mile Island nuclear accident
1980 - 1988: Iran-Iraq War
1981 - Present: HIV/AIDS pandemic
1983 - 1985: Ethiopian famine - 1 million+ deaths
1984: Bhopal gas disaster (India) - 15,000+ deaths
1986: Chernobyl nuclear disaster (USSR)
1987: Black Monday stock market crash
1989: Exxon Valdez oil spill
Late 80s - early 90s: Recession 1990 - 1991: Desert Storm
1991 - 2002: Somali Civil War & famine
1992 - 1995: Bosnian War & Srebrenica massacre
1994: Rwandan genocide - 800,000+ deaths
1999: Columbine High School massacre (the beginning of a trend)
2000: Y2K
2000: Recession (Dot Com Bubble, etc)
2001: 9/11
Early 2000s: Recession (Fallout from 9/11) 2001 - 2021: Afghanistan War
2003 - 2011: Iraq War
2004: Indian Ocean Tsunami - 230,000+ deaths
2005: Hurricane Katrina - 1,800+ deaths
2007 - 2008: Global Financial Crisis
2008 - 2009: Great Recession
2009: H1N1 swine flu pandemic
2010: Deepwater Horizon oil spill
2010: Haiti earthquake - 160,000+ deaths
2011: Tōhoku Earthquake and Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Disaster
2011: Arab Spring uprisings & Syrian Civil War begins
2014: Ebola outbreak (West Africa) - 11,000+ deaths
2014: Russian annexation of Crimea
2015: European migrant crisis
2017: Hurricane Maria (Puerto Rico) - 3,000+ deaths
2019 - Present: Covid19
2020: Australian bushfires - 3 billion animals affected
2020: George Floyd protests & global BLM movement
2021: January 6th US Capitol riot
2022: Russian invasion of Ukraine
2022: Pakistan floods - 1,700+ deaths, 33 million displaced
2023: Turkey-Syria earthquakes - 50,000+ deaths
2023 - Present: Hamas-Israel war and open genocide
2025: Global Trade War

The first third of this list took place during the Cold War, when WWIII and nuclear attacks were a real fear. Add in climate change, the discovery of microplastics in everything, the world seemingly embracing Fascism again, and a whole slew of other shit, and it’s no surprise that suicide rates have increased almost 40% over the past 25 years.

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This isn’t a good example. These two images were 80 years apart, and the people running the company under Nazi rule are long dead. May as well be a different company at that point. A much better example is the exact same company in the exact same year putting Pride flags all over their socials in western countries, while refusing to put Pride flags on any of their non-western socials because they don’t want to offend the countries that gleefully imprison and execute LGBTQ+ people.

This article breaks it down.

I haven’t seen a candy shop with the scoop bins in forever. When I was a kid, they were a staple of Americana.