A good character design is one you can look at and instantly know what they're all about without having to be told.

Would you have guessed that the character on the right is meant to be a healer?

I'm gonna look at the characters from Concord and see what I can guess about them.
Keep in mind, I don't know anything about Concord's story or characters, so I'm trying to figure out what these characters are based purely on how they're designed. Tell me if I'm right.

Here we have some kind of lady in a hazmat suit holding a grenade launcher. Maybe she shoots poison gas. Perhaps she works as some kind of space bug exterminator.

In terms of gameplay, I'm gonna assume she's a support class who sets traps or uses area-of-effect weapons to deny the enemy team access to locations.

"WhEn YoU aDjUsT fOr InFlAtIoN, gAmEs ArE aCtUaLlY cHeApEr Now!"

THEY NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN OVER $50 IN THE FIRST PLACE. "You don't understand! Games are so much more expensive to make now! See, we just have to have celebrity voice actors and Hollywood level visuals! We just can't turn a profit unless we sell you half a game for $70 and make you buy the rest as DLC, on top of microtransactions!"

I just watched the Hazbin Hotel pilot. I had seen it before, but I couldn't remember it.

I hate the art style. Almost every character design is like some kind of edgy DeviantArt OC. Most of them are overdesigned and make no sense. Why does the Radio Demon have fox ears? He has no other animal features, and it makes me wonder if the only reason he has them is to make his silhouette more distinct. Aside from him carrying around a staff with a microphone, nothing about his design reflects his radio motif.

I keep telling you, the cyberpunk dystopia you're gonna get isn't gonna be Blade Runner.

It's gonna be Her. This isn't a joke. There's a loneliness epidemic that's getting worse every year, and even though it's probably being caused by technology, we will become increasingly dependent on technology to cope with loneliness, to the point that entire industries will spring up around it.

"We're not allowing ad blockers on YouTube anymore. Disable your ad blocker or you can't watch anything."

"Okay."

[Clicks on video. Waits for two pre-roll ads.]

"WHAT IS UP YOUTUBE! IT'S YOU'RE BO—"

[Mid-sentence ad break.]

—Y, YOUTUBE GUY! TODAY'S VID—"

[Another ad break.] If a YouTuber doesn't specify their own ad breaks in a video, YouTube will just put ads on their video, whether or not the uploader wants them there, and they will just put them at random spots in the video, even less than 90 seconds apart.

"Well, people of Narnia, it's been fun, but we need to give up our royalty and go back to the human world for no fucking reason where we have to pay taxes and ride the subway."

"Wow, Peter. I sure am glad that we gave up being the kings and queens of a magical kingdom to come back here."

I explained why this shit happens in my review of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

It ain't for artistic reasons.

https://twitter.com/TheDiscFather/status/1680286914845499392

The reason they use CGI for things that don't need to be CGI is so they can change them at any point in post production when executives inevitably demand changes based on market research or the censorship laws of other countries.

It's kind of astonishing how grown adults don't understand that if a movie costs $300,000,000 to produce, it making $300,000,001 at the box office doesn't make it a success. By the way, The Little Mermaid still hasn't broken even, and The Flash is tanking.

Why sacrifice for a career to get a house and family when that can all be taken from you in a divorce?

Why do the dirty and dangerous jobs if they won't get you respect from women?

Why join the military and risk your life for a civilization that says you're worthless and evil?

https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1649689312295022592

An entire generation of men has grown up being told women can do anything they can do but better, and that neither women nor society in general need them, and they are the cause of all of society's problems.

Why should they contribute to a society that hates them?

How did the Fire Nation take over the world when Earthbenders exist? I would Earthbend the minerals in a motherfucker's bones. I'll waterbend the fluid in your intervertebral disks and stretch you like the fucking Godskin Apostle.

I started watching the "live action" Pinocchio remake which isn't really live action because it's 99% CGI.

I'm about 36 minutes in and so far the whole thing has been carried by Tom Hanks. In fact, he's practically the only thing we see for the first fifteen minutes. Disney decided to make this movie nearly two hours long for some reason, so the scene with the Blue Fairy is needlessly stretched out. In the original, the Blue Fairy scene goes on for three minutes. In this one, it's about double that.

Sometimes, I see things that are popular but are so bad that I can't imagine how anyone likes them, and then I wonder how many people who claim to be fans of that thing genuinely like it or just pretend to for social reasons. I know a lot of "Top 50" charts are full of songs that were paid to be put on there by record companies, and some of those songs are so bad and so interchangeable that I have to assume at least some of the people who listen to them only do so because they feel socially pressured.

"I don't care about plot holes. If the plot was strictly logical and characters behaved consistently with their characterization and motivations, it would be boring. I think it's more important for a story to be emotionally satisfying than to make sen—" First of all, no one has ever complained about a story making too much sense.

Second, there's no reason a story can't be both logically satisfying and emotionally satisfying at the same time. Actually, I would argue that logic is necessary for an emotional payoff.

Here's my horrifying theory:

We don't see any alien civilizations because there's a narrow window of time when a civilization has the ability to colonize other planets before technology-related societal, economic, and environmental problems compound and make it impossible. Right now, the window is closing for humanity. We won't be able to spare the effort it takes to explore space once we're too busy trying to survive the in the disease-ridden, poverty-stricken, polluted, pleasure-obsessed, tribalistic mouse utopia we're creating for ourselves.

I don't know why "Mary Sue" is trending, but I guess now would be a good time to explain what a Mary Sue actually is.

A Mary Sue is not an overpowered character. It's an overly idealized character; an "author's pet" if you will. A Mary Sue is often the author's subjective idea of a perfect person. Whatever flaws they have are not real flaws, such as being "too kind" or "too beautiful". Since they are already perfect, they have no room for character growth, which makes them boring to the reader.

I started watching Turning Red.

I'm fifteen minutes in and every character is horribly obnoxious. I hate energy of this movie. It's like Scott Pilgrim on crack. Everything is heightened as if designed to be as annoying as possible, especially the scene where the mom embarrasses her in front of the boy she likes, which is so over-the-top that I thought it was a dream sequence.

Developed countries have higher suicide rates than the developing world (with some exceptions) because 1) poorer countries tend to be more religious, and religious people in general are less prone to depression, and 2) technology has had a negative affect on our mental health. Not only does electronic news and social media expose us to depressing news about the state of the world, but now we have quick and easy access to dopamine rushes thanks to the online entertainment and social media, so now everyone wastes time and feels unaccomplished.

I just saw Pixar's Lightyear.

Some dumbass who bought a $20 refillable popcorn tub just left it there, along with their garbage so an employee had to clean it up. Anyway, Lightyear was okay. My sister didn't like it.

One minor thing that bothered me was Buzz Lightyear— a trained Space Ranger— needed time dilation explained to him. I understand that was for the sake of the audience, but they probably could have written it differently.

I just saw Jurassic World: Dominion.

It was better than the last one, but that one was like a Syfy Channel original movie with a bigger budget, so that's a low bar. Blue is barely in the movie, so if you have some emotional attachment to that character for some reason, you'll be disappointed to find out she's only in a handful of scenes at the beginning and end.

Replacing her for most of the movie is her son, Beta.

"This verdict is a setback for survivors of domestic abuse and violence."

How? The victim in this case, Johnny Depp, got justice against his abuser, Amber Heard. You should be celebrating this.

Unless, of course, you view this through the lens of "men = bad, women = victims". "I was hitting you... you're such a baby."

I barely even remember the original Top Gun, so it's not nostalgia talking when I say Top Gun: Maverick is one of the better movies I've seen this year. While it does have a lot of spectacle, it doesn't rely on it so much as it does on tension and suspense. It's not a CGI clusterfuck where an entire city gets blown up and we're expected to care because we're told the universe is at stake. It's more of a character-driven drama.