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wild_turkey

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Everything posted by wild_turkey

  1. Ellie killing the pregnant woman and then covering her belly as she died was brutal. No way to know if those 2 adults were guilty of anything other than being associated with Abby (whose guilt is also open to debate), but the baby was innocent and Ellie panicked and didn't even try to save it. In that moment, she really came across as a mad person on a senseless quest for vengeance that will result in more unnecessary human death. Jesse is already on the list. Death that is acceptable to her as long as she avenges Joel. Hard to be in her corner at this point. Having not played the game and not knowing what happens next, it's hard to say how I feel about the ending. It's certainly possible that Ellie is actually dead. It seems obvious that we will spend at least a small part of season 3 seeing the world from Abby's POV. The only thing we know of that Abby has done wrong so far was to kill Joel, which was her own vengeance for him murdering her father. She's morally no worse than Ellie, possibly better. This story is good at blurring the lines between good and evil. I suppose when you play as Joel or Ellie in the video game, it's like you are that character and you live and die with the decisions the game is requiring you to make. You believe that you can charge into dark buildings with potential zombies and raiders because that's how video games operate and ultimately killing a person like Abby is the task you've accepted when you play the game. When you are watching the show, you feel more like a third party observing someone else making these decisions, so psychologically there is a little bit of a difference and it allows a TV viewer to be more judgemental over the character's actions. I'm also annoying about the predicted 2 year wait for season 3. Not sure if that blame gets assigned to TLOU team or to HBO execs, probably the latter, unless the writers are just really slow about getting the story together. It's certainly not unique to this show but it does kill momentum and this is a frustating place to leave a story in limbo for that long. Maybe I'll pick up TLOU2 game and play it out on the easiest setting.
  2. lol at a $300 end of year teacher gift. I say that as someone who’s wife was a public school teacher and never received anything close to that, and as someone who tries to be very generous to the teachers at our kid’s preschool. Anyone who gives that level of gift most likely has their kids at a pricey private school. Casually suggesting that it should be the norm for an average family is a bit out of touch.
  3. There were parts of it I really liked and parts of it that felt somewhat messy. The action was incredible as always, especially the submarine scene and the airplane scene. The visuals were great and I appreciated the cast and their performances. Tom Cruise and his stunts will be missed when he is finally done making movies. Perhaps a bit too much time was spent revisiting scenes and people from previous MI films. I think a callback to one character (Donloe) and then one montage would be great, but the first hour felt like they were trying too hard to pay tribute to the franchise. The overall plot of DR and FR felt a bit sloppy, especially trying to tie it back to the Rabbit’s Foot and make this all Ethan’s fault. They could write the AI villain and combine it with human villains (Gabriel) and keep it a little tighter without all the extra moving parts and footnotes. It’s probably a step below Fallout and Ghost Protocol for me, but I still enjoyed watching it and would take an “average” Mission Impossible movie any day. I think this is written to be the end of the series but could definitely see Tom Cruise pull a Tom Brady and come back for more.
  4. Rewatched Dead Reckoning last weekend. Going to see the new one tonight.
  5. Kinda sad that I half expect this to be on our horizon.
  6. Regarding our public schools, I get all the frustration regarding the lack of funding increases, the existence of vouchers, and discrepancy in public allotment vs. vouchers. I’m curious though, how does this actually stack up compared to other states? What financial metrics are available to know where Texas falls compared to everyone else? Are there a lot of other states that are doing better, or is everyone slipping in similar fashion? Perhaps more importantly, what reliable indicators of overall state academic performance are there? I’m not very well informed on these, so despite my frustrations about the first point, I’d like to better understand the big picture. Suppose I want to move one day and I want K-12 education to be a factor in deciding, how to I begin to evaluate that in the least biased way possible?
  7. Are they permanently closing?
  8. We watched the most recent episode of The Studio immediately before TLOU and it was funny seeing Catherine O’Hara in both shows with such different roles.
  9. Thought it was very well done. Liked seeing Joel and Ellie back on screen together. Explains a lot about Ellie’s attitude this season.
  10. The president of our country is going on senile online rants against Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen, commenting specifically on their physical appearance while he is a fat old fuck with orange skin. How embarrassing that our country elected this asshole.
  11. Some of his behaviors seem a little autistic and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s on the spectrum, but he’s also just a narcissistic asshole.
  12. Congrats to the nerds. They were great when they needed to be great, apart from that one leg when they had horrible navigation. This was a very good season of TAR. Lots of competitive teams, close finishes, cool locations and challenges. We’ve beat the Jonathan horse to death but he’s a miserable asshole and Ana needs to leave him. The way he talks to her is beyond pathetic.
  13. My cherry tomato leaves are yellowing, something I wouldn’t normally expect until later in summer. Is this from overwatering (lots of rain)? Should I just ignore it and go easy on the watering for a bit?
  14. Well it’s also pretty predictable from the moment they separated from Jesse. Everyone should’ve expected him to show up at a critical moment, and if that’s a hard plot development to accept, this may not be the show for you.
  15. Perhaps I’m missing something, but why does it matter if Leon and the scout team died immediately prior to the rest of the episode or in the distant past? Perhaps the timing is vague because that’s irrelevant and the story is unchanged by that detail. If it becomes relevant later, then I’m sure there will be stronger clues to fill us in.
  16. I took it to mean that Nora had merely heard from her WLF/Firefly buddies that there was supposedly an immune girl in SLC at the time of Joel’s bloodbath 5 years ago. Abby would’ve told her if no one else, but from their POV, Ellie disappeared after that so her existence would’ve become a bit of an urban legend. Seems like 5 years without any sign of her would make a lot of people wonder if it was ever true at all.
  17. There have been a lot of good teams this season but Alyssa and Josiah are my favorite in quite a while. They really know how to have fun together and also support each other when it gets tough. They are easy to root for, but I’d honestly be happy with anyone except Jonathan.
  18. Jonathan continues to outdo his own awfulness. He got bested in jousting but no way would he accept any blame for slowing them down. Instead, he made Ana take 5 cheeses to his 4 and then blamed her for getting the last one wrong. He griped at her climbing the stairs. While she got directions from strangers, he complained about her to the cameras. She was driving and navigating while he sat in the back seat criticizing her. Then in the car he said “Lord give me patience with this woman.” Pretty telling pattern of chronic abuse when she accepted blame at the finish line and then repeated Jonathan’s unwarranted criticism back to Phil. If he’s like this in front of cameras, it’s scary to think about their home life. She should leave him again, for good this time.
  19. Well the bald chick became incapacitated fairly quickly, so maybe the scout team started to transform before they understood what was happening and had any ability to kill themselves. My only gripe is the scenes when Ellie and Dina are walking down the middle of the street in broad daylight having a conversation at normal volume. At least stick to the sides of the buildings and speak a little more quietly. In fairness though, this happened a little bit with Joel in season one as well.
  20. I think the pacing is fine. We have 2 episodes left in the season to maybe find and kill Abby and maybe resolve some of the WLF/Scars situation. A couple episodes ago, people were complaining that Ellie and Dina got to Seattle too fast. It can’t suddenly be too slow. Although, knowing now that there were only 2 games and that TLOU2 will span seasons 2 and 3, most likely we don’t get resolution to some of this. I’m hoping that at least Abby gets killed because she isn’t a very exciting big bad. Dispense of her and then set up a standoff with Jeffrey Wright and separately the smart zombies.
  21. So about 6 months from now when the tariffs have been nothing but a failure, he will be able to attack Bessent for being a FOOL, similar to Powell. Textbook Trump.
  22. TWD was never very good to begin with. People watched it because TV series were starting to have a breakout moment, the zombie genre had not been done in TV yet, and AMC had earned some respect from MM and BB. But it basically sucked from the start. Zombie fighting was central to the show because the human characters were generic and boring. TLOU was very good in season 1, and I think Craig Mazin did well when he deviated from the source material - see: S1E3 One Good Day. Neil Druckmann has also been a solid director. It exists in a world with zombies that sometimes create problems, but tries to be much more focused on human character development and interactions. Everyone who heard anything about the games has probably heard that games 2-3 were not as well received as game 1. Having now seen the death of Joel, I think most of us can understand why. I’ve also heard some reviews that the story remained very good, so hopefully that will be the case for the remainder of the TV series. So despite sharing a genre, I don’t think the comparisons between TWD and TLOU are fair. The former was a sloppy show with bad acting that meandered for 11 seasons (seriously?!) with no clear direction and lots of gotcha bullshit moments. The latter is a compact story based on specific source material that is scheduled for 3 seasons, with overall good acting and production value, currently in a season 2 transition period after losing one main character.
  23. You’re more optimistic than I am.
  24. That’s not even what Proverbs 16:9 says. I was curious because that shit sounds like a stupid cop-out for anything. What it actually says is this: “A man's heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps.” - KJV Or if you prefer: “In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.” -NIV I’m not sure how you get from that to that bullshit cowboy meme post, but if someone is a Christian, perhaps they shouldn’t post memes with a scripture reference and quotations as if to suggest that is the exact word of god, when that is not at all what the Bible says.
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