Me, ignoring my problems

Ironically, my favorite story from that collection is a hundred word horror story about Santa.

Huh… Maybe OP is just really offended on St Nick’s behalf?

More importantly, why is the gay room so small? You can barely get any gay in there.

Shattered Horizon. It was awesome.

Listen, if AI was replacing executives instead of hardworking creative types, I’d be all for it.

Christ, with how limited the brainpower of your average c-suite is, you wouldn’t need “AI”. I could probably replace most of them with an excel spreadsheet.

What the fuck are you on about? They’re talking about using AI to replace the incredibly talented human labour at studios they own. Y’know, like the people who made Valheim, Deep Rock Galactic, Satisfactory, the new Tomb Raider titles, Metro Exodus…

Embracer are shit, but what makes them shit is that they’re fucking murdering a lot of genuinely talented studios that produce great work.

Embracer, functionally speaking, have zero understanding of how game dev works. The whole thing is just a massive investment fund. Basically a bunch of rich assholes who bought up every small developer they could get their hands on and then tried to MBA all the numbers up by cutting headcounts and doing other useless metrics driven bullshit. Then when this failed to produce meteoric returns on investment they all went surprised pikachu face.

I’m not sure I fully agree there. I think it’s absolutely accurate to say that Andor didn’t need to be Star Wars. Like, you absolutely could file all the serial numbers off and get a show that works in more or less exactly the same way.

With that said, I think Andor absolutely benefits from being Star Wars, in a couple of a ways.

The first is that they can skip all the broad strokes world building. We don’t need the concept of the galactic empire explained to us, or the general structure of how the senate works, and so on. The big pieces are all in place, so they can get straight to the small scale world building instead. This would be a solvable problem if you were creating something new, but its definitely nice that they get to skip straight to the important bits this way.

The second, bigger benefit (IMO) is the juxtaposition created by the tonal shift. Something that’s very notable about Star Wars is that the tone and the content are often rather at odds with each other. George Lucas is on record as saying that in his mind the Rebellion were the Viet-Cong (with the obvious implication that the Empire is the USA). That’s some fucking heavy shit. Luke’s adoptive parents get brutally murdered by agents of the state, for absolutely no crime at all, and this inspires him to take up with a group of, well, terrorists. I mean, this is literally the same as a young Palestinian joining up with Hamas. Star Wars is about some really, really heavy shit, but it also starts with the line “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” This is a fairy-tale about magic space wizards, but also a story about insurgents blowing up a massive military installation, and eventually performing a coup and assassinating the head of state.

Over the years, the story around Star Wars has leaned increasingly into the “magic space wizards” side of things. It’s seen as a family friendly property, something for kids to enjoy at Disneyland. The creators of Andor set out to intentionally shock the audience by creating something that leans hard away from that family friendly image. Andor is a fucking dark story, about desperate people adopting brutal methods in the face of brutal oppression.

And they’re not just doing that for shock value. The point of this is to tell a story about the ways in which we idealise “rebels” in one breath and condemn “terrorists” in another. To many people, Luke is a hero, but that young man who joins up with Hamas is a monster. Reality is complicated and messy. Hamas are a real political group, with a real ideology, and despite the monstrous oppression they face, some of that ideology really sucks. Their targets aren’t “Storm Troopers”, they’re often civilians, or conscripts. On the other hand, many of those conscripts behave in ways far more monstrous than anything the empire is ever depicted as doing.

Andor is a story about fascism, about the absolute necessity of resisting it, and about the monstrous personal cost that resistance can demand of us. By setting that story against the backdrop of a “family friendly” property I think it really does a lot to drive home the disconnect between our ideals of resistance and the cold, hard reality.

Honestly, fair (and I say that as someone who is a huge, huge, HUGE fan of Andor). Like, if you’re looking for some cheesy fun science fantasy schlock about space wizards, do not watch that show.

Fun fact; in the scene where K2SO slaps Cassian while pretending he’s a prisoner, Alan ad-libbed the “And there’s a fresh one…” line, and Diego Luna immediately cracked the fuck up during the take, but being a total pro he manages to (almost) hide it behind his hand while pretending he’s holding his face. Alan’s delivery was so good that they kept the take.

Andor is the kind of show where I would literally recommend it to someone who hates Star Wars. It’s just such an incredibly raw, powerful, and vital piece of media. One of the finest works of anti-fascist art I’ve seen in a long time.

Anyone who hasn’t watched that show is robbing themselves. Moments like “one way out” and Luthen’s “sacrifice” monologue are going to live with me for a long time. Season 2 can’t come soon enough.

Also B2EMO is the best droid in all of Star Wars (Fun fact; his voice is the puppeteer’s, but it wasn’t supposed to be. They were planning to overdub, but then the guy did such an amazing job on the set that they just gave him the role).

In order to buy out Paradox, EA would have to make an offer for their entire existing share float, which would then have to be accepted by the shareholders. This means that they would almost certainly sell their stock at over market value (because why would they accept less?).

From their point of view, this would be a good thing. So why then would the shareholders allow this project to be cancelled if it was about to net them a huge payout, according to your theory?

What in the actual fuck are you on about?

Cascade would require the card to go into your deck, not your hand. More likely you’d have to get into your graveyard using something like dredge or One With Nothing, and then use some kind of resurrection spell to put it in play. But then you’d have to deal with the fact that most resurrection spells target a specific type, like “creature”.

If it was actually priced at 0 mana, yes, it would be an unbelievably strong card. It only puts you up 1 in terms of card advantage, but it cycles your deck quickly which is very powerful. Basically a better Gitaxian Probe, minus the hand information. If a card like that existed in Magic, it would be an auto-include in every deck. OTOH if I’m casting a spell to tutor up a card from outside my deck, +1 card advantage is the last thing I’m hunting for at that point. Griselbrand let’s me draw seven any time I like as long as I have the life for it. Necropotence or Yawgmoth’s Bargain let me draw basically my entire deck under the right circumstances. If I’m looking to storm off or something, that’s the kind of card draw I need.

In Magic, if a card doesn’t have a mana cost, it cannot be cast by normal means. Since you only get add the outside card to your hand, not put it into play, you now have absolutely no way of playing it. That 1000/1000 is stuck in your hand.

You can only have four of any card in most Magic formats. So even with perfect draws, you’re only getting four pieces of Exodia, without retrieving this from a graveyard. Theoretically doable, but in Magic any deck that relied on playing the same card five times would be a genuinely terrible deck.

Thing is, Pot of Greed doesn’t even come close to the kind of card draw you can get in MTG. Try Necropotence on for size.

Two problems:

1. Solemn Wishes doesn’t have a mana cost, so it can’t be cast. Cards without costs aren’t free in Magic, they’re actually uncastable by normal means.

2. LP isn’t health in Magic. It’s called Life. So yeah, you’d gain 500 LP, which would be some kind of spendable currency like energy, but you’d have nothing to spend it on, and it wouldn’t do anything to your life total.

Yes, I am really fun at parties.

To play a card in M:TG it must have either the Land type, a mana cost, or some other means of casting it explicitly described in the card text.

Since this spell only puts the card in your hand, congratulations, you now have a useless card that you can’t cast.