Would you care to make a case for Lady in the Water? I don’t recall a huge amount of that movie, but what’s there is not positive. Admittedly, his gall in writing a character who is destined to save the world through his art, and then casting himself in said role, left a pretty sour taste in my mouth, but I shouldn’t let that affect the other aspects of the film.

According to the definition posted above, the cultural expressions of biological sex are only one dimension of gender, and you’re ignoring the other aspects. I’ll accept fish don’t have culture, though I bet someone more knowledgeable than I could argue that point. However, let’s look at social behavior via a vis courtship rituals. Like birds, some fish develop pretty incredible displays for getting it on. If a fish which has changed its biological sex then changes it’s behavior during courtship, that would seem, to me, to indicate a different expression of biological sex independent of genetics (i.e. gender). Unless there is a genealogical basis for courtship displays, which I don’t believe to be the case.

Well, now I can only think of being Sherlock Holmes battling bioweapons, and I fear you’ve set me up for disappointment!

Zack Snyder, not JJ Abrams.

Sometimes, the humor is found in how unsubtle the methodology is. A carpet bombing approach, one might say.

And it’s pretty good! I had fun with the time I put into it, though it did feel a little bloated in the same way their Pathfinder RPG did. I think it’s a consequence of their Kickstarter success for these games, which just kept talking on more stretch goals.

The good news is there is a LOT of game present for those that enjoy it.

They don’t make Ballnostrillian mask, I worked with what I had access to.

Idk about that, I heard a fair number of folks who were less enthused with Eternal vs 2016. The general sentiment among those folks was that Eternal skewed too far into “combat puzzle” territory, where encounters felt like they had prescribed “solutions” that you needed to perform to succeed reliably. This iteration being less about resource management and high speed encounter flow seems to be a reaction to those critiques.

You’re doing good work.

Why do I feel like the music cue after that statement is this.

Well-meaning idiots, in Wayne’s parlance, and I doubt very much that Eastwood’s philosophy differs that much. Unsurprisingly, the ideological bent of the film was a topic of some controversy, even during its release. The term “fascist” was thrown around with the frequency of a Lemmy politics thread, and not without good reason. For their part, the director claimed that he was a left leaning liberal who viewed Callahan as “as evil, in his own way, as [Scorpio]”, and Eastwood, while denying the movie was right wing, stated it was about “frustration with the judicial system”.

Suffice to say, the politics of these movies are complicated (at best), if you choose to engage with them on that level.

In addition to the above, which explains the actor’s thought process, I think it’s an intentional choice by the filmmakers to juxtapose the “peace and love” iconography of the hippy movement / era against the depravity of Scorpio.

Obviously, Dirty Harry was directly inspired by the Zodiac Killer, whose confirmed kills occurred in 68-69. Significantly, the Zodiac’s first and second letters were sent to newspapers on July 31st and August 4th, 1969. I say that this is significant because, not even a week later, on August 9th, the Tate-LaBianca murders occurred. Moreso even than the Zodiac murders, the Manson Family belies the viewpoint of Dirty Harry, i.e. that, for all the flower power aesthetic and grandiose ideas, the hippie movement was populated by anti-social, perverse, and dangerous criminals.

These people, if not representative of the hippies as a whole, were at least taking advantage the well-meaning idiots who would naively take their side. See this quote from John Wayne about the counter-culture: “I’d like to know why well-educated idiots keep apologizing for lazy and complaining people who think the world owes them a living. I’d like to know why they make excuses for cowards who spit in the faces of the police and then run behind the judicial sob sisters. I can’t understand these people who carry placards to save the life of some criminal, yet have no thought for the innocent victim.”

I believe this sentiment is, in essence, Dirty Harry’s thesis. Consider the scene in which Harry is reprimanded for obtaining evidence against Scorpio illegally, making it inadmissable and leading to his release from custody. Furthermore, in the final seconds of the film, after beating Scorpio in the quick draw contest, Harry spends a little bit of time ruefully gazing at his police badge before hurling it into the lake, presumably because of the number of obstacles that bleeding hearts put in between him and getting the bad guy.

Nothing to be done for it.

Okay? Again, who are you serving by choosing this specific forum to shout that messaging? I know you aren’t OP, so consider that the royal “you”.

It’s just tiresome is all, and I’m on the “boo, capitalism” side of things. It’s like the folks who turn every thread tangentially related to Microsoft into a Linux advertisement. Or the involuntary ejaculation of a vegetarian when the subject of diet comes up. Like, yes, these folks are probably correct about the things they are saying; you’re never going to be wrong to consider the angle being worked by a corp. However, it’s infantilizing to suggest that people are unaware that a corporation wants their money. That’s a given, and without additional commentary, it’s a positively useless statement that only serves to make people tune out the messaging, even in contexts where it IS desirable to bring it up (such as when a company is doing shady shit in pursuit of your money). Releasing a mediocre graphical remaster of a title that people have nostalgia for hardly qualifies as “shady shit” in my book. Lazy, sure, but not shady.

Given your parenthetical, I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, but I’m gonna dispute that the series of novels about the fractured and imperfect nations of “the West” uniting against an alliance of barbaric monsters and uncivilized men in “the East” is apolitical at all.

Not to mention it’s a text which presupposes the divine mandate of kings, which is an explicitly political stance.

Which is not to say any of this is bad, necessarily, though I do think it would be a fun exercise in fan fiction to rewrite Aragorn’s arc. Instead of it culminating with him accepting his “birthright” and becoming king, he winds up fucking off back to the woods with his hot elf-wife and telling Gondor to sort their own shit out.

Oof, I’m glad you saw humor in the latter day Moore installments, but I avoid that era of Bond because my interpretation was that noone was in on the joke. If there was any sort of realization that Moore was too old for the role behind the scenes, they didn’t let on with the choices they were making in front of the camera (and I think it’s pretty well acknowledged that Moore, at least, felt like he had aged out of the character towards the end of his run). Idk if a bigger wink would have helped necessarily (that era of Bond already strays dangerously close to self-parody), but no-selling it didn’t work for me either.

Just came from another thread detailing them walking back the skin=class change. Glad to that’s being fixed, as that’s definitely the most egregious issue, but I’m very disappointed to hear the gunplay is less impactful. That was KF2’s biggest strength imo, esp as a Commando main when I played it frequently. Popping domes in slo Mo was art.

cart retrievers are paid to do a job. I allow them to do it.

You intentionally make that job more difficult under some presumption that you’re ACTUALLY doing them a favor?

Cool.