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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   1771 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 1, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Any resident OSINT predictions for the war? I feel like it’s impossible to determine what’s happening.

The usual Twitter OSINT pages are pretty barren. Nobody (at least nobody public) seems to really know how much of the IRGC command structure is intact, how many missiles they have left, if they’re still producing drones, whether civilian or other leadership is in charge or if it’s individual IRGC commanders targeting and firing with no overall strategy, what’s happening with the new supreme leader election etc.

One imagines actual US and Israeli intelligence has somewhat more insight given how thoroughly the latter especially penetrated Iranian intelligence (although the source inside Khameini’s inner circle was apparently CIA rather than Mossad depending on who you believe) but maybe they don’t.

Most Iranians don’t seem particularly fond of the regime even if they’re not wealthy North Tehran libs, but the IRGC did recruit heavily from the devoutly religious lower middle class, especially more rurally, and many are now second-generation soldiers. There were stories, as the rebel army marched on Damascus, of wailing and praying at Shia shrines there by predominantly overseas posted IRGC families before they were evacuated. The possibility of true believers holding on for a long time can’t be discounted, although at the same time they’re not used to nomadic hardship and living in caves to the extent that, say, the Houthis are.

I don’t think this will end well. If oil crosses $100 next week and polling gets really really bad for Trump I think a unilateral cessation of US military action is possible, framed of course as a “mission accomplished” just like the strikes last year.

The Israelis might keep fighting but they can’t really; Trump already had Witkoff force a ceasefire in Gaza. Then wait for Khameini’s son to be elected supreme leader, he makes the vaguest overture for peace, go back to negotiations, probably agree to another ‘deal’ along the lines of what was proposed at Geneva, and then the IRGC go right back to the nuclear program all the same. The collapse of the Iranian government requires either a full ground invasion (not a brief incursion by an expeditionary force) or a successful popular uprising.

3-6 months. CENTCOM requests for intelligence analysts. Start your search with that.

So there is as usual backlash against OpenAI and purity spiral going on. Due to the pentagon deal. So people are canceling their openai premium accounts. Here is the problem though - OpenAI loses money on those accounts. As is claude.

So here is the question - how to punish someone that subsides a service you heavily use?

In the specific case of OpenAI, start feeding it factually incorrect nonsense prompts, then respond to them with more nonsense. It'll burn money on their side, and make the training data less useful.

This isn't complicated -- if they're asking you to use their service for free, it's cause they want you to use it (they think it's worth their money to subsidize your service, e.g. to further long term growth). If you want to oppose them, don't use it.

As someone with almost no experience I want to use AI code a game that’s basically a top down build and chase tag type game, think rts custom mod.

How feasible is this? What should I use? AI says Godot but I have no idea if that’s a good suggestion.

Godot actually is a good suggestion. It's an engine that's very amneable to a code-centric approach, which should make it much easier for an LLM to work on.

If you want to make an RTS custom map, why not use an RTS with custom map features instead? You will have a lot of assets available to you, and for the most popular games there should be a decent amount of documentation for the AI to draw on.

I want to make a standalone game. There’s already a custom map that I’m playing now.

I see. In that case, Godot, Unreal Engine, and Unity are all fine choices. Unreal Engine is probably out if you want the AI to generate most of the code though, since it will likely have to write it in C++, and I doubt you want to deal with that as a beginner. Between Unity and Godot, it is down to personal preference. There may be more tutorials on Unity, which would make your AI better at giving good responses. But the GDScript language of Godot is in my opinion more beginner friendly than C#.

As for feasibility, making a game is hard and takes time. Without AI, I would estimate anything remotely complex as a multi-year project, provided you want to make a game and not just a tech demo. Even making solid custom maps (where much of the code and assets you need already exist) can take months. With AI however, maybe that will change.

Unreal Engine is probably out if you want the AI to generate most of the code though, since it will likely have to write it in C++, and I doubt you want to deal with that as a beginner.

Unreal Engine is out for a beginner for a whole host of reasons, but one thing that GPT 5.2 is actually decent at is writing C++ code. I have a decade of experience in C# in Unity and a good deal with Godot, and hadn't done any C++ in over five years, then came to Unreal...and ChatGPT and the GPT-5.2 Copilot really pulled their weight in getting me onboarded. Turns out their corpus of training data does contain a lot of C++ knowledge!

That said, Unreal really is monstrous for beginner devs, and Unity and Godot are clearly the sane choices.

It's got a developer with more programming background than (I think) ThomasdelVasto has, but I'll point to Three Kingdoms Strategem. It's very much emphasizing the retro bit for speed of development, but I could believe Petersen's <six month estimate more than I do the GTA6 release date.

My estimate assumes ThomasdelVasto is a beginner at all things gamedev and is working alone in his spare time. Not saying all interesting games take that long. Obviously it changes with experience and how much time you allocate.

That said, AI could speed up the process, and it depends on how ambitious he is. It is of course entirely possible to spend less time if you know what you are doing, and keep a reasonable scope. But anyone opening with "what engine should I use" probably doesn't know all that much yet.

I did not mean to be discouraging, but simply wanted to inform that making games is difficult and takes time. An interesting prototype can be created within a few weeks, but making something that is fun for an hour or more just takes a lot of effort.

But a lot depends on the AI. If it can make up for the lack of experience, then maybe this project will take much less time than that.

Zorba’s rant general advice on engines holds pretty strong today: Godot’s closer to Unity in ease of use and Unity’s licenses are worse and worse-supported now than then, but the ranking matches my feelings. That said, as bad as getting a wildly mismatched engine can be (eg, it is technically possible to do an action game in newer RPGmakers; it just sucks), for simple projects the perfect is the enemy of the good enough.

Make sure the engine can deploy to the target environment you want, check if any game BBC in the engine rhymes with your concept, and that the license isn’t ruinous, and pull the trigger.

Feasibility… depends on scale, and how much no experience is.

Claude and Codex can do a lot for someone who doesn’t know what a class is, but if you every want to look under the hood you’ll need at least a 101-level understanding of primitives vs classes, object instantiating, method calls, flow control, and dealing with coordinate systems from hell. For simple projects you can avoid that sorta inspection, but it’ll cost you a ton of time and tokens.

Scales’ the other half of things. Even if you can get consistent character art out of a diffusion model ten times faster than a conventional artist, trying to make a 100-plus character roster might still cost weeks and months in a 3d environment or with dozens of complex sprite animations. On the other hand, if you’re aiming for 2010-mobile game level complexity, it might not even be a week to a prototype.

Should be doable. Use claude code or codex.

Use one that allows you to host the game in local with fast compile times. AI improves via feedback loops. It is much easier to guide it when it can do a quick compile -> view -> fix -> repeat. Given the popularity of Unity, LLMs would be most comfortable developing with it. Don't take on a large change by itself. AIs are best at getting some demo in, and then iterating on it.

I hate C# (and all Java family languages), but Unity sounds like the easiest way to get started.

I'm not in the industry but make things for fun sometimes, and my experience with godot is that it can be a bit hard to get one's head around. On the other hand I do everything manually and haven't vibecoded so who knows?

But it seems hard to go wrong with python.

Hmmm another dev interested in this is saying Unity. Seems tough to learn.

IMO Unity is the best-rounded and most user-friendly toolkit. In terms of functionality, its Editor is leagues ahead of Godot's and Unreal's. C# scripting is the best balance of powerful and easy to learn. OTOH, Unity has legendarily unreliable licensing, it's full of crusty, outdated systems that dangle around and can lead you on pointless detours, and a bunch of deeply-entrenched bugs with a prognosis of "won't be fixed, just hope the system gets replaced". Unity does have by far the most resources available for learning, and by extension probably the biggest knowledge-base for LLMs to work with. Its runtime performance is easily the worst out of the big three.

Godot is lighter-weight, more streamlined, has better performance, and is easier to work with if you want to do as much as possible in code. But depending on what functionality you want, especially from the editor, it may simply lack some of the features that Unity offers. Its documentation is also hit and miss, and it contains some bugs on account of its relative immaturity, which however do get fixed with some regularity.

Why are the republicans having such trouble getting the votes for the SAVE act? It seems even the republican senate leadership is tampering with it. What is their specific objection?

Trump has successfully convinced his base that there is large-scale, partisan-asymmetric fraud in US elections such that clean elections would materially help Republicans. Republican senators know that this is not the case.

At a practical level, the SAVE Act does two things:

  • It makes certain types of fraud harder to do, mostly ones which people who actually understand US election security think are not common.
  • It disenfranchises a small number of voters due to bureaucratic fuckery.

Random paperwork-driven disenfranchisement helps the party whose supporters are richer, better educated (because they are more likely to be able to fix paperwork issues) and more urban (because it is harder to run the kind of political operation that fixes paperwork issues for voters in rural areas). In the current year, that is the Democrats. That married women using their husbands' names are somewhat more likely to be disenfranchised by paperwork issues makes the partisan asymmetry worse.

So if the fraud isn't real, or the SAVE Act doesn't stop it, or the SAVE Act stops it in a partisan-symmetric way, then passing the SAVE Act will hurt Republicans. (Why don't Democrats support something like the SAVE Act if it helps them - same reason the Democrats don't do other things that would help them win elections but might get you called racist) So Republicans who might face tough elections want to stop it passing without being blamed by the MAGA base for stopping it passing.

My parents are giving me $250k because they gave an equivalent amount to my sister so she could buy an apartment in London. I don't really want the money and have tried to argue them out of giving it to me (would rather they enjoy their retirement) but they are insistent, especially since they gave it to my sister. Being able to pay in cash for a house in Baltimore (if I stay here) would be pretty huge, but I'm not sure where I will be in a few years time so a house doesn't seem like a great use of time or money right now. Should I just keep it in the market until then (transferring to my preferred stock/bond distributions where appropriate)? Are there any other big ticket items that I should consider purchasing? A car would probably be useful, both for my practical and romantic life, but if I move to Europe in the next two years (maybe 30% chance), it's a terrible investment. I could also donate most of the money to charity, but that feels both like slapping my parents in the face, and potentially making life much more difficult for myself. Even if the money were to just sit in money market, it would be an extra $10k of income a year, which is substantial.

Fuck the house, the car, and especially the money market/bonds, just index fund it. If you didn't need a car before, you shouldn't buy one now: it's a separate issue. This is also true, though to a lesser degree, for the house. Break the proletarian cycle of "have money => spend money". Finance and consumption are different ledgers.

Well a house would reduce my "spending" considerably. My biggest monthly expenses is rent. A house could turn this into a zero, or potentially positive category for me.

Consider the opportunity costs; as you say, you could get 10-20k/y by investing it, with which you could also pay your rent. In any case, given the likelihood that you're going to move, possibly to Europe, it's a moot point: you shouldn't buy a house.

I'd say invest it. Then later once you've got a better idea of where your life is going and if you need the money or not you can either spend it towards whatever end or donate it (and the interest) to charity then.

Absolutely get a car, a used one, in the "lease return" range (3-5 years old) of a popular, reliable Japanese brand. Toyota, Honda, Subaru. They'll be fairly expensive at first, but if you need to sell them in 2 years they'll barely have depreciated.

I've seen this advice from multiple commenters, so will start looking into it as soon as I get back to Baltimore!

To back this up, I bought a low mileage 2010 Honda Fit in 2016 for 9K. I just sold that car to carmax for 3.5K. While I had it, I only had normal car maintenance costs (oil changes, brake pads, the occasional tire). 5.5K for 10 years of car ownership seems reasonable to me.

And I probably could have bought it cheaper if I haggled - I don't, I'm bad at it. And I probably could have sold it for more if I'd done private sale, but I'm dealing with other things and couldn't be bothered.

With those brands, you can also always get a 15 year old model with around 100k miles. It will perform equally well as the 3 year old model, but be substantially cheaper to buy, easier/cheaper to repair (do research, get a model that has a reputation for being reliable and common), and it will not depreciate at all if you drive it for 2 years and 20k miles.

I'd just get a Toyota with hybrid drive from that era.

The reason I would recommend one that was a lease return or in that range is that he's thinking of a car in terms of how it would improve his love life; a car that looks close to new helps more in that case. Also, it's likely still under warranty (at least partly), if it's a lease return, it's had one owner, it's been likely maintained by the dealership at recommended intervals and you can assume it hasn't been beaten up too bad. If you just need reliable transportation and want to pay the least then I agree, a proven survivor in the deep part of the bathtub curve is a great choice.

I understand what you're saying, but there's a difference between a clean car and a beater. Women don't know anything about cars, and car design hasn't changed enough in the past 20 years to make anything look seriously dated. She's not going to peek at the odometer. I recently bought a new car and rather than be exciting it was brutal, due to parting difficulties with the old one I had put 150,000 miles on in 6 years. I made a decision with my mind and not my heart (which would have had me shoveling money into the old one), and regretted it for the first week. I tried explaining this to several women, and they all thought I was insane. Men, on the other hand, could relate to what I was going through. To men, a car is like a friend. To women, it's just another appliance.

The one aspect of cars that women will appreciate is the interior. There's a certain irony to this, as almost every woman I know drives a car with a basic interior. My theory behind this is that since they treat cars as appliances they buy models they hear are "good" and when they're shopping they gravitate towards the more affordable ones because they don't care enough about cars to see the difference. Men are more likely to spring for the higher trim packages, so the interiors are generally nicer. After driving beaters for years, my first car out of law school was mid-trim and every car I've had since has been top or next to top trim. These are not luxury cars; the first car that I got compliments about the interior from was a Sonata Limited. In my experience, Hyundai and Mazda tend to have the nicest interiors among the Asian brands. I had a Subaru with the top trim and, having gone back to a Sonata, I once again have buttons that are a pleasure to push. While it may seem odd for anyone over the age of one to experience pleasure from pushing buttons, well, you just haven't pushed any good ones. At this point, I feel mildly depressed when I ride in a car with a crappy interior, especially newer cars with crappy, basic interiors.

The above may suggest that a luxury car is the way to go, and it can be, but OP would be advised to proceed with caution here. The first issue is that European luxury cars are overengineered monstrosities which is fine if you're leasing one, like most people do, but for which ownership of an older, high-mileage models means frequent, expensive repair bills. The second, more immediate problem is that these cars will attract women, just the kind of women you probably don't want to attract. As I said earlier, women don't care about cars. To the extent they can be used as a signal, they're less about trying to send the right signal and more about avoiding sending the wrong one. A sensibly-priced newer vehicle from a mass market brand doesn't send any signal, which is fine. It's basic transportation. A ten year old beater sends the signal that one is poor or cheap, which is bad. A luxury car sends the signal that one is wealthy, which is also bad, because you're now attracting women who you wouldn't be attracting but for displays of wealth. There are obviously degrees of this; driving a Lexus or BMW sends a very different signal than driving a Lambroghini.

The upshot here is that if OP wants to maximize his car's effect on his love life he should buy a mass-market brand with the top trim level. It should be noted, however, that the effect on the trim level will be marginal and he should only go this route if he wants it for himself. The age and mileage of the car doesn't matter as long as it's clean and not seriously old. That being said the car I had that got the mst attention from women was a 1974 Dodge Dart, but that car was so gloriously awful that I can't recommend it in good conscience, assuming one can even be found.

I hate to repeat the "Miata is always the answer" meme, but it might actually apply here. 2 seats is all you realistically need.

(Of course, it's also Baltimore, so maybe get the hard-top.)

The problem with the Miata is that there's no cargo room. If he's successful and wants to take his lady friend away for the weekend, getting two suitcases into one of those things is going to be a challenge. A friend of mine had one he took camping and he had to pack similarly to how he would if he had taken his motorcycle, which wasn't some Harley cruiser but a Triumph sport bike. But beyond that, even getting groceries into one of those things is a challenge, unless you're going every few days. I like Miatas, but if you're only going to have one car and want something sporty, there are better options out there.

I like Miatas, but if you're only going to have one car and want something sporty, there are better options out there.

True; the only actual car Ford sells these days is just "better Miata" for a really good reason. Also (mostly) true for GM, for that matter.

Bonus points for being cheaper on the used market than the average NA or NB; why pay 15 grand for 150 HP when the S197/S550 Mustang or C5/C6 Corvette exists for the same price? Not like those are any more expensive to keep running...

The car I actually had in mind was a Civic Type-R, though there are a lot of cars you could sub in here, the idea being that these are normal cars designed for normal driving that have just been modified a bit for performance. The problem with the S550 is that for the price you quoted you're only getting a V6, which is a mid-life crisis car for a woman. You can get an S197 for that price but it's probably been in at least one wreck. I don't know how much a C6 goes for these days but if OP went that route he should spend the rest of the money on veneers and hair dye and head down to the local suburban townie bar where he can hit on hairdressers who bitch about how their ex-boyfriends are always late with child support.

The problem with the S550 is that for the price you quoted you're only getting a V6

300HP is arguably more than enough for this use case; the S550 doesn't look as nice in my opinion, but is still the better car over the 197 (especially the 197s with the 4.0, which really is just a Miata with 4 seats and more room). I guess the Camaro counts too but the interior isn't as nice.

And then the Corvette, which is... also just a Miata in terms of practicality, but one on which the LS swap was done from the factory.

Not that both don't have the same kind of stigma, since the Ford has My Little Boomer on the front and the Corvette defines the archetype. That being said, though...

If the plan is to enjoy it, oh absolutely. OP just didn't strike as someone who wants a fun car since I figured he'd already have a car or know he wants one if he was.

A car would probably be useful, both for my practical and romantic life, but if I move to Europe in the next two years (maybe 30% chance), it's a terrible investment.

You're a second class citizen without a car in America (NYC doesn't count), so even for 2 years it would be worth it. Just buy a used, reliable model, you would be losing around ~15% max in 2 years.

I could also donate most of the money to charity, but that feels both like slapping my parents in the face, and potentially making life much more difficult for myself. Even if the money were to just sit in money market, it would be an extra $10k of income a year, which is substantial.

Why are you even considering donating it if $10k/yr is substantial income for you? That's 25 years (less after taxes) of your 'substantial income' gone from your pocket.

I'm sure your parents worked hard for that money, enjoy the fruits of their work and use that money to improve your life.

The only reason I would consider donating to charity is that I worry that unearned wealth is a bit of behavioral hazard for me. But like you said, it will make my life significantly better, and I have sufficient maturity to use it responsibly and not be a wastrel/spendthrift. A car and a house are solid investments that will make my life better.

To clarify my financial situation. I currently am a PhD student and earn ~$50k/year. I expect to graduate within 15 months and earn anywhere from 75-150k. An extra 10k a year right now would effectively double my savings rate, while maybe not being too impactful in a few years time.

You could always charitably donate it to me if you REALLY don’t want it. ;)

On the eve of a very large potentially global war, I would secure a primary residence (if I didn’t have one already) before throwing it into the market.

The problem is I am potentially moving away from Baltimore within 1 year and have signed a lease for the next year already. I will know by the fall if I'm going to stay, in which case I will be house hunting in earnest.

Buy a place and rent it out. Or airbnb if it's suitably central

edit: actually if I'm giving serious advice, use some of the money as a deposit to buy a place and use the interest to pay down the principal, and put the rest into other investments

While I don't have a full picture of your overall financial situation(and I'm not asking), if I were in your situation I'd probably invest.

Not sure why you don't have a car, but if you shop right for your needs, you don't really need to tap into said investment to grab one. My suggestion would be an old hatchback - fun to drive with good gas milieage.

Are your parents aware that this is a taxable event, and that they are essentially throwing a large chunk of that money at the government by not structuring it properly?

If they are aware and you are simply eliding structural details, then... carry on! But I can imagine they are not aware simply because the previous gift took place internationally and so may have been overlooked by taxing authorities. Of course, the IRS doesn't always notice these things, but often they do.

You might thus "discourage" the gift by requesting that they structure it for tax avoidance, e.g. by creating an appropriately drafted trust (use a reputable lawyer, this should cost somewhere between several hundred and a few thousand dollars depending on the details, much less than the anticipated tax bill). Of course, you then must rethink the timing of your benefits.

They are structuring it appropriately I believe. I am going to have to pay capital gains tax, and they arguing to have to pay some kind of inheritance tax, but I don't claim to understand the details on their end.

If you have the time, you could also structure it over time to fall within the IRS gift limit: This year they could each give you $19k without federal tax implications. Ask a real professional about capital gains basis changes and state implications, though.

They said that this is what they should have been doing but didn't plan ahead.

Looks like federal capital gains are 15%, and state is 4.75% if I stay under 100k total income and 5% if I stay under 150k. The smartest plan seems to be for me to wait until I need the money but otherwise cash out less than $50k a year.

You should put the maximum amount into a Roth IRA. This is a tax advantaged structure to assist with retirement.

Real estate in desirable cities is the best bet for appreciation(your cap on IRA contributions is a lot lower than that), due to Tokyoization over time. If you don't want to do that, you can buy precious metals as a savings account with extra steps, you can put it into a mutual fund.

You probably should buy a car, you kinda need one.

I've maxed my roth from last year (lol slightly offended you think I don't know what that is), but I suppose I can max for this year too.

They're transferring me mutual funds, some of which I will sell to get away from the NVIDIA bias.

A car makes sense if I stay in the US. If I go to Europe (which is a real possibility after my PhD) I a). may not need one, and b). should probably buy one there.

One thing about the car purchase is that this doesn't have to be a bad investment. If you buy a new BMW 530i yes that's setting money on fire. If you get a 5 year old sedan, you'll only be paying a little in depreciation.

Same with housing in Baltimore. At a 3 year time horizon the appreciation+principal will probably equal the transaction costs, with a lot of utility.

Remainder in vanilla brokerage and growing for when you do want to do something real.

Congratulations on the windfall

Well it's more like a 1 year time horizon. I'm getting my PhD at the latest in May 2027. I will know better what my job plans are more firm in the fall, so planning on waiting until then, although a car would probably be huge.

Thank you!

A used, reliable sedan will give you more than enough utility to compensate for depreciation over ~1yr.

I'll look into it! Thanks!

Does that kind of transfer cause a step up in basis?

So, what are you reading?

Almost finished Al-Ghazali's Book of Contemplation and trying to go through his Censure of Wealth and Miserliness. Still on Macpherson and others.

About half-way through Bennett's The Tainted Cup, essentially biopunk Sherlock Holmes. It's a genre where I can't really rate it til the denouement, and it's about as woke as you'd expect something published in the mainstream in 2025 to be, but it's been reasonably well-written so far.

About three-quarters of the way through Ubik.

How are you finding it?

It's pretty trippy. I like reading books where I have no idea where the story is going to go next and I feel like the rug will be pulled out from under me at any moment. I'm enjoying it a lot more than The Man in the High Castle (which I read last year), but not quite as much as A Scanner Darkly.

Just started re-reading John Dies at the End by Jason Pargin. I scored the sequels on sale for cheap from the Kindle Bookstore and it's been so long since I read it that I really don't remember much of it outside of my enjoyment of it.

Started The Count of Monte Christo.

Had to read that one for French class in high school. The way Edmond got cucked was particularly painful. But his revenge schemes were way too elaborate, and would never work in real life; man needs to learn that shooting is not too good for his enemies.

What I remember most is the way his cellmate promises to teach him "mathematics, physics, history, and the three or four modern languages with which I am acquainted" within a couple of years, in a prison with nothing in the way of materials. Which goes against everything I know of pedagogy. But, then again, Alexandre Dumas was a writer, not a mathematician or a physicist.

Good book. Public domain, too, so lots of adaptations, some of them great. Probably the standard modern version would be the 2002 movie with Jim Caviezel, but if you are ever in the mood for something a little more exotic, Gankutsuou is excellent (and particularly innovative for choosing to tell the story from Albert's POV).

Gankutsuou was pretty great and I still think about it a lot many years later, but I have to say that the way they tampered with the end was abhorrent to me.

Maybe it's been a while, but my personal head-canon was that Edmond didn't get cucked, and his fiance only married his enemy to protect Edmund's son she was pregnant with at the time.

...yeah, maybe it's time for me to re-read the book. I blame the anime for this.

That's actually from the movie, which reveals that Albert is Edmond's and Mercedes's son, and that she only married Fernand to provide him with a father (Fernand is unaware, so in this version, it is he who is cucked). In the book, Albert is Fernand's son, and Mercedes married him after eighteen months, having given up hope that Edmond would ever return.

Ah, that explains it, then. Well, glad to see I atleast pulled it from somewhere, as opposed to the idle and delusional musings of my mind.

Only ~100 pages in but I've seen the film before and know the story. So far my only complaint is that it can read like the gears in the narrative are slipping and making the story jerk forward unexpectedly. It's probably intended as a clever literary device to create intrigue but it feels like I've stroked out and missed a chapter.

I don't mind a little liberty with realism, it wouldn't be much of story if he just got thrown in prison and died of dysentery.

Hey, I'm sure there was simply not as much as much "mathematics, physics, history" to go around 180 years ago.

Almost as good as The Count of Monte Carlo.

I had to reread that one so many times to figure out how good it was.

But much, much better than The Count of Monte Crisco.

Why do you think it is impossible to create good Terminator and Predator sequels past part 2 (I stand firm that predator 2 is underappreciated)

Prey was pretty good. Predator Badlands went a bit too hard in the "Predator and Alien are in a share universe you guys!" direction, but at least the action was pretty good.

Because the more sequels you add to any franchise, the more it gets diluted. You have your novel idea, that's the first movie. You have questions arising or undeveloped plot points from the first movie, that's your second. Maybe you can get a third out of it, but from that point on, you're just trapped in Flanderization (see all the slasher movie/horror movie franchises which run out of ideas until they're at the point of "for the fifteenth time, the dead serial killer is resurrected but this time in, uh, spins wheel of fortune space!")

What pisses me off is the constant drive to create sequels that recontextualize the originals as only one part of a larger narrative with higher stakes that is almost always less creative than the original vision. It actively damages story of the original unless you decide to be arbitrary with canon. See, for instance, Alien. The monster being just a monster that can hunt humans effectively is very good. It is actively harmed if you actually need to know that it was found because David in Alien Covenant did blah blah blah... and in Prometheus we learn that the xenomorphs are actually... None of that shit matters, let the monster be a monster, I don't WANT the answers, the unknown is better.

A sequel should be another story. For instance, in Ghostbusters II, they don't suddenly decide that actually, that Goser in first movie was just Vigo's lieutenant and now the real battle is happening. For all we know, the stakes are similar between the two movies, maybe even lower in the second one (after all, they're no longer facing a literal god of antiquity).

A sequel should be another story.

For fairly good examples of this, see Indiana Jones 2 & 3. They don't try to reinvent the canon of the first movie but are simply further adventures that Indy embarks on.

I tend to avoid sequels for this reason. I think some of it is, for me, that the world building in a brand new story is really interesting, but sequels either drag along accumulated baggage of the world (Marvel of late has done poorly on this), or lazily skip over any new exposition within the narrative (this script was originally an episode for another TV show). Both end up being detrimental to the story as a whole. And sometimes you start running into the structural contradictions woven into the environment.

I think successful sequels have to do something to transcend the original story. Terminator 2 and Aliens both subvert the genre from horror to action movie IMO successfully. The Empire Strikes Back is a very different movie than Star Wars. But that isn't a guarantee of success: IMO all the Jurassic Park sequels fall short of the original in emphasizing "dinosaur eats humans" action over the original's balance with philosophical science fiction questions.

The Empire Strikes Back is a very different movie than Star Wars.

To be fair, that falls into the category of "second in a trilogy", which is narratively and structurally different from "sequel". At least, it should be, but writers are often hacks.

To be more precise, Star Wars is a two-part trilogy, where the original movie is made as a standalone, and its outstanding success results in two sequels made back-to-back that are better understood as two halves of one big movie than as two separate movies (The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean are also good examples).

Ironically I think Flanderisation is what made the Fast & Furious franchise succeed. The story was only ever an excuse for over the top stunts and car fighting, and each sequel progressively shrinks the story and inflates the stunts to increasingly absurd proportions (including cars in space).

Yeah, I think for something where the plot is only an excuse for the ACTION!!!, you can get away with it (though as we've seen, Marvel have managed to milk the cow dry, with people finally getting burned out on the plethora of movies being released). I might go see a fourth Iron Man movie. I'm unlikely to go see Ant-Man. When we get to "nobody knows or cares about this character, why are they getting a movie?", you stay home and see if there's anything on Netflix.

I might go see a fourth Iron Man movie. I'm unlikely to go see Ant-Man. When we get to "nobody knows or cares about this character, why are they getting a movie?"

Iron Man was the first "nobody knows or cares about this character". He was the best B-list guy that Marvel Studios could pull out of a hat, and they settled for him because their A-list characters (Spiderman, Wolverine and the X-Men, Hulk, Fantastic Four) all had movie IP either sold to or at least encumbered by other studios. They had him played by Robert Downey Jr., then a C-list actor most famous for tabloid-bait substance abuse problems. It just turned out that RDJ was still an excellent actor, who managed to answer the "why are they getting a movie" question so well that we forgot it was ever even a question.

Later they started digging into their D-list characters ... and they still managed to hit it out of the park: Guardians of the Galaxy is the top-rated non-sequel movie in the MCU.

The problem isn't that nobody cares about C-list Ant-Man (whose first movie is higher-rated than Iron Man 2 or Iron Man 3), the problem is that the damn producers, directors, and writers stopped caring about Ant-Man. In Ant-Man 3 there's no significant character growth, meager personal/emotional stakes, no proper utilization of the drama they set up for him in Endgame, a cast crowded to the point that he felt like an extra in his own movie, and "ACTION!!!" that's so flooded with CGI that even the most basic physical conflict feels about as tense as playing a video game. Ant-Man seems to primarily be there because giving him top billing was expected to lure in an audience (which your testimony suggests was somewhat pointless), and their major concern for the audience was that we be exposed to a plot focused on setting up Kang as a multi-movie villain (which turned out to be completely pointless after they had to fire Jonathan Majors).

Their new plan is to bring in Doctor Doom (an A-list villain), played for some reason by RDJ (now an A-list actor), but you still might want to consider staying home and browsing Netflix, because dragging back RDJ suggests that they're still focusing on how to lure in an audience rather than on A-list writing.

Doctor Doom could be great but (1) you need to have a decent actor playing Reed Richards as the deuteragonist and (2) you need a really good writer not to make Doom stupid, Richards weak and stupid, and avoid temptations about ret-conning or making the villain too sympathetic and (3) yes, you do need Reed Richards, Victor has set up his entire notion of revenge against him even if stepping back and looking at it as an outsider that's dumb, Victor and (4) don't forget that he's ruler of Latveria and well-regarded by his people since he is actually a decent ruler, don't make him some kind of 'this is commentary on Trump authoritarian fascist dictator Amerikkka nazi bad guy'.

I don't trust any studio right now to pull that off.

Well, first of all, your premise is wrong, because Branches on the Tree of Time exists. Now, granted, it's only a fanfic, but in principle there is no reason why it could not be filmed and become the best Terminator movie since Judgement Day.

Secondly, I am of the opinion that most sequels are bad, because they derail a complete, satisfying conclusion. The only thing that justifies a sequel is if the original is not so good, and the sequel is much better. Terminator 2 fits that description. Predator 2 does not.

Now, granted, it's only a fanfic, but in principle there is no reason why it could not be filmed and become the best Terminator movie since Judgement Day.

Sure there is: It completely ignores prime parts of the franchise's setup such as rewriting Sarah Connor's personality to a weirdo rationalist character so that the author can shoehorn his ideology into a familiar story as well as magically moving the story forward by 13 years.

Or to put it another way, it's not and cannot be a sequel. At best it would be a completely different story with terminators and a completely unfamiliar character who somehow shares a name with Sarah Connor.

There's one very obvious reason: you can't make Terminator films after it.

Because Hollywood is afraid of reboots or retcons?

The Terminator sequels were all hoping to set up a timeline they could squeeze/mine. That's why they usually have some sort of stinger or tease (IIRC Genisys had a tease with Arnold becoming a liquid metal Terminator which...ugh).

They simply failed every single time and had to reboot.

This is a one-and-done idea. That's fine for fanfiction but are you going to pay Arnold and Hamilton's likely extortionate fees in order to try to successfully end the Terminator franchise? Look at the MCU: a good ending can be its own curse.

are you going to pay Arnold and Hamilton's likely extortionate fees in order to try to successfully end the Terminator franchise?

I mean, Hamilton did help terminate the last series she showed up in...

I just happened to re-read it last week, and I agree that it's excellent, Wales at his best. It would probably make for a good movie.

Terminator two had a plot such that making a sequel necessarily creates a plothole. It was a neat, tidy self-referential loop... which renders the whole plot irrelevant.

Terminator 1 is the neat, tidy self-referential loop. Terminator 2 had the "screw destiny" message and ended on a high note (Skynet was never created, Judgement Day was averted, John Connor grows up to become a politician and fights his battles with words instead of bullets, Sarah Connor has a grandkid, everything is fine).

"The future is not set" was part of Reese's message in The Terminator, and the villain's entire plan hinged on the idea that changing the future is possible. I don't think Terminator 2 invented the idea that maybe we can screw destiny, or that The Terminator required an unchangeable timeline.

I nonetheless find The Terminator probably a better movie overall, or at least, one that has a more powerful, emotionally resonant ending that Terminator 2's turn toward the saccharine, but there was at least a little groundwork.

"The future is not set" was part of Reese's message in The Terminator, and the villain's entire plan hinged on the idea that changing the future is possible.

Reese isn't the guy to ask, he's the pawn of the guy who actually has a holistic view of time travel, a reverse Isaac sent to his death by his son as a sacrifice.

Connor's actions in the film heavily imply he believes time is a flat circle, correctly. That's why he can blow up the machine and feel secure he won't need to send Reese any reinforcements.

Terminator

By the time T3 came out (in 2003), the style of action scifi that the Terminator 1 & 2 were was getting too far out of style. Since then it's only gotten worse.

This may be nostalgia but to me both Terminators appear to be more "grounded" than more modern action scifi films. Yes, there are killer robots but once you get down to it most of the on-screen action could be described as "Young man and woman try to escape a monomaniacal Austrian bodybuilder in a leather jacket while falling in love" and "An Austrian bodybuilder in a leather jacket tries to protect a teenage boy and his mother from a psycho killer while learning to be more 'cool'". If you remove that groundedness, a sequel just doesn't feel like right.

Then there's is the cautiously optimistic vibe. A part of what made both T1 and T2 feel so good was that neither had a downer ending or even setting. The end of T1 implies that the bad future has been averted while T2 finishes with Sarah Connor saying "The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it for the first time with a sense of hope, because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too". How do you make a sequel that manages to keep things reasonably optimistic without basically undoing everything that has happened?

Finally there's just the fact that both movies were just goddamn great and it really isn't easy to make a worthy successor for a movie of that caliber while having to stick to an established setting, never mind for two. Good plotting and directing, quotes galore, outstanding music and iconic characters. The T-800 is Arnold while Linda Hamilton starts as a fairly realistic slightly ditzy girl next door in T1 and evolves into a a fucking ripped warrior mama who leaves no doubt that she is capable of doing what needs to be done to protect her son all the while staying feminine (ie. no unrealistic freak territory).

Terminator 3 was a semi-ok movie as such if you're ok with John Connor looking like a hobo Beverly Hills 90210 / Dawson's Creek "teenager" but ultimately is what you get when a sequel loses the vibe and just isn't that good. Terminator: Salvation was a sequel only in name. Genisys tried to be a proper sequel but replaced Linda Hamilton with a silly little girlboss with zero credibility and the ending was frankly ridiculous. Dark Salvation was some weird dystopic and depressive attempt at probably being "gritty and real" but mostly seemed to just concentrate on removing everything good from Sarah Connor to the extent that I couldn't make myself watch more than a few scenes where Arnold showed up.

I think Terminator 3 (or perhaps right after it) was the final moment when a proper sequel was possible but that would have required involvement from James Cameran and for everyone to have been more enthusiastic about it. Any time after that there was too much baggage in modern Hollywood trends that prevented making a proper sequel (in addition to Arnold playing The Guvernator during most of the 2000s). Just compare Linda Hamilton with the girlboss replacement.

Dark Salvation

Yeah, they're starting to blur together for me, too.

How do you make a sequel that manages to keep things reasonably optimistic without basically undoing everything that has happened?

By not shooting the main character in the first three minutes of the story? Low bar to clear, but Dark Fate doesn't even manage that!

but replaced Linda Hamilton with a silly little girlboss

The series stopped being about Sarah-John (interestingly, you don't hear much about the other series that still should feature this, and I'm not actually sure why that is). That's part of why T3 was meh- sure, it's spectacular, but not as interesting with Just John.

T2 is timeless because it has to do with motherhood just as much as it does fatherhood. Dark Fate, and Genisys (to a point), intentionally spits in the face of both.

What strikes me looking back at the whole series, actually, is how much every film except Terminator 2 feels profoundly of its time. The Terminator is a 1980s action horror. I watch it and I am back there in the 80s. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is definitely a film of the 2000s, with a lot of early CG effects, trotting out a film star who is just starting to look too old for this, and a lot of military-industrial complex, War-on-Terror paranoia. I have not seen any of the films past 3 (I hear I'm not missing much), but I'd be shocked if anybody remembers Genisys or Dark Fate as anything other than interchangeable, forgettable action films.

Terminator 2, by contrast, feels fresh and timeless every time. Maybe it's because it was one of those seminal films that created the modern action film? It marks the end of the genre I think of as 80s action, creates the 'modern', 90s-and-onwards genre, and because we've spend the last thirty years or so in cultural stagnation, that still feels new?

Maybe it's just that Terminator 2 is really good, but I'm not sure that's it - if nothing else, I like the first film more! But notwithstanding, I think Terminator 2 transcends its origin in a way that The Terminator does not.

It marks the end of the genre I think of as 80s action, creates the 'modern', 90s-and-onwards genre

Yeah, Terminator 2 was the template until The Matrix came out.

I feel like any Terminator 2 influences weren't nearly as overt as The Matrix and everyone and their cousin trying to ape bullet time or something similar.

Agreed. With the exception of some questionable soundtrack choices and John's totally radical slang, Terminator 2 feels remarkably timeless.

It takes a lot of skill to create tension, in general.

T1 there was the whole "this is an implacable, nigh-invulnerable killing machine that is programmed to kill YOU, specifically. And your only defense is a squishy standard human."

T2 had that, PLUS the target was a child, who now had to befriend his own implacable, nigh-invulnerable killing machine.

Repeating the formula starts to break that tension, even if you ostensibly escalate with a bigger, badder robot. Harder to manipulate audience expectations.

Similar with Predator. You can keep iterating "now they're in the 1700s. Now they're in Japan. Now its an alien planet and there's 10 preds." But how do you get audiences to buy in a third, fourth, fifth time?

And the Alien series. "Oh man one of these things was terrifying. How about HUNDREDS of them?"

Where to do you go from there without being derivative?

I think this has also hurt the John Wick films. By the third, we know he's going to be pull his suit up to cover his head and will never take a serious wound during an action sequence.

By 4 he's surviving MULTIPLE 30 foot drops.

Its still great action, I still like the films, but the appeal in the first was that he did seem vulnerable.

Its should, I think, sometimes be easy to say that you can capture "lightning in a bottle" only 2-3 times and unless you're a generational talent at filmmaking, things will inherently get formulaic if you keep trying to recreate that success.

And the Alien series. "Oh man one of these things was terrifying. How about HUNDREDS of them?"

Where to do you go from there without being derivative?

Alien Resurrection showed one possible way to do that. Unfortunately the movie fucked up in so many other ways, probably not helped by the setup from (equally fucked up if in other ways) Alien 3.

I think it's a mistake to think that you necessarily have to escalate. There are many other ways to add a twist. Sure, Aliens added a whole lot more aliens but it also transformed the movie into a different genre and made Ripley into one of the most badass female film characters of all time (an excellent example of how to show an actually badass female character instead of telling someone is supposed to be one).

I agree.

Some of my favorite series of all time basically just advance the plot in interesting directions, let the characters have meaningful development, and then, (key point) put those characters in situations that actually, believably challenge them.

The Bourne Trilogy (I generally don't acknowledge anything that came after) was incredibly tight on scripting, never let the scope grow too big. Add likeable characters here and there, and then ratchet up the tension on them.

I think this has also hurt the John Wick films. By the third, we know he's going to be pull his suit up to cover his head and will never take a serious wound during an action sequence.

Zvi Mowshowitz had a post about the legal systems of John Wick in which he says that the "legal"/political background of the films (and therefore the types of story that get told) is what changes from episode to episode. [Basically, from an "honorable" criminal organisation where the morality is Lawful Evil, the Continental Hotel is sacrosanct, and markers are honoured, to outlaw life as opponents of a lawless shadowy conspiracy which controls the High Table and includes the man who finds Wick in the desert, to something vaguely reminiscent of feudalism by the fourth film].

The situation seemed to have changed from the Cops being aware that the assassin underworld exists and willingly staying hands off (Jimmy the cop asking John if he's working again), to one where the Cops are functionally powerless since the assassins operate an international network with friends in high places.

Then the "High Table" seems to be some absurdly powerful entity that still operates outside the law, but its not clear exactly how powerful (dropping whole busses full of armored spec ops at the Continental is a clue), to, yeah, seemingly being a world power of some kind.

My 'headcanon' as far as that goes is that national governments accept their existence and use them as a nonmilitary method of intervention and conflict resolution, and this is what sustains the overall assassin economy (which otherwise barely makes any sense), as long as the High Table can keep collateral damage to a minimum.

Hence why John repeatedly going ham at dance parties/nightclubs becomes a real problem.

'80s horror series (including, interestingly, the ones that rip off that style like Stranger Things) also all suffer from this.

Ironically, the series that avoids this is, of all things, FNAF, to the point it blew up into an entire ecosystem. But FNAF is a game- a simple one, at that- that relies on abusing a fundamental quirk of human biology [re: a thing that screams at you and gets all up in your face when you lose] as the main tension driver (and everything else is pseudo-ARG for people who actually want to engage with it).

Episodics tend to avoid this, but they have different problems, which leads to the Half-Life 2/3 problem.

Hilariously, Predator was created in the first place due to this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_and_John_Thomas

The brothers took inspiration from a joke circulating Hollywood concerning the Rocky franchise and how its lead character would have to fight an alien as there was nobody left on Earth to fight, and wrote a screenplay based on it.

lol.

Sort of makes the point, though, doesn't it?

If you have an actually interesting idea for an existing franchise... maybe its better for everyone if you mold it into its own thing, first, so it doesn't carry baggage from said existing franchise that might weigh it down.

Me, I don't know how to tell when its sensible to take a new idea on an existing series and add it to the canon, vs. create a new, wholly unrelated work so it stands on its own.

I just know that more series than not end up wearing out their welcome when they go that route.

With regards to Terminator, every time travel story ultimately has to take a firm philosophical position on whether the past is mutable or not. The original The Terminator was an enclosed, self-contained story which took the stance that the past was immutable: the ending reveals the entire story to have been a stable time loop. Terminator 2 set out to surprise audiences at every turn (oh my God, Arnie is the good guy this time!) which extended all the way to its ending and its reveal that, in stark contrast to the original movie, the past is mutable. The film ends on a note of optimistic uncertainty, with the protagonists' actions appearing to have averted the future apocalypse for good. This was made even more explicit in the original scripted ending which depicts Sarah, John and Sarah's grandchildren in an idyllic future Los Angeles, which was thankfully cut for being too sappy, on-the-nose and tonally dissonant with the rest of the film. (James Cameron has a recurrent problem with indulging his inner Spielberg and wanting to end his films on a corny sentimental note, only for cooler heads to prevail in the editing suite and instead opting for something more ambiguous and restrained.)

Not having seen any of the sequels following the first one, all my knowledge of them is secondhand, but my understanding is that every subsequent sequel has set out to follow the example set by Terminator 2 and have its philosophical attitude to the mutability of the past directly contradict the attitude espoused by the previous film. This leads to an interminable game of "the past is immutable – no it isn't – yes it is — no it isn't – is – isn't". With a binary question, the number of times you can surprise audiences by changing the answer is exactly one. When Terminator 3 revealed that Judgement Day was still going to happen, audiences didn't find this exactly as shocking as Terminator 2's implication that Judgement Day could be decisively averted; rather, it registered as a regression to the original film's status quo. In spite of Cameron's strenuous efforts to reinvent the entire franchise from the ground up with Terminator 2, by the end of Terminator 3 the franchise was back almost exactly where it started. Eventually audiences just got sick of being jerked around and lost interest: no permanence, no stakes.

Another reason might be a bit more mundane. The Terminator made the most of its limited budget, but some of its visual effects looked pretty ropey even at the time. Half of the appeal of Terminator 2 was getting to see a story very similar to the original (indeed, the plot beats and structure are so similar that in some ways it's more like a remake than a sequel), but with an expanded budget and improved VFX wizardry. The visual effects of Terminator 2 were mind-blowing on release and have aged incredibly well. But you quickly run into the law of diminishing returns: while I'm sure the visual effects in the subsequent sequels were marginally superior to those of Terminator 2, they could never hope to match the quantum-leap sensation of the transition from The Terminator to Terminator 2. "Come see the Terminator, with visual effects that will blow your mind" is an easy sell, unlike "come see the Terminator, with visual effects very slightly improved over previous Terminator films".

Another reason might be a bit more mundane. The Terminator made the most of its limited budget, but some of its visual effects looked pretty ropey even at the time. Half of the appeal of Terminator 2 was getting to see a story very similar to the original (indeed, the plot beats and structure are so similar that in some ways it's more like a remake than a sequel), but with an expanded budget and VFX wizardry.

See also the Matrix Trilogy.

They did their damndest to keep the visuals impressive and upping the ante thanks to unlimited budget. And sort of succeeded but also sucked the actual heart and soul out in the process.

Yes, hence the joke about how there weren't any Matrix sequels.

On the other hand, there was a very nice prequel called "The Second Renaissance"; 20 minutes of animated goodness exploring the backstory to the movie's setting. The allusion to "Saigon Execution" goes hard.

I watched The Animatrix when it came out on VHS (Christ, VHS? I wonder how many of the users on this board even know what I'm talking about), and remember finding most of the shorts quite entertaining and stylistically distinct.

Looking it up now, it turns out the protagonist in one of the shorts was literally named "Cis" lol? Let no one say the Wachowskis' insistence that The Matrix was always intended as a trans metaphor is just a retcon: it was staring us in the face right since the beginning.

Hot take incoming: I think The Matrix Reloaded is vastly underrated. Although nearly three years after posting that comment, I still haven't gotten around to watching Revolutions.

I would agree, and quite a bit of the issues are editing more than anything.

One thing the first film thrives on is efficiency. Most sequences are short, aside from two major action set pieces. The highway chase/fight in Revolutions AND the burly brawl are too long, and aren't really serving the story in the way the subway fight does in the first one.

Lot of fun ideas at play though. The films at least had somewhere to go after the sequel hook from the first.

I saw Reloaded three times in theatres. The action sequences were just sublime for that era.

2003 also had The Last Samurai, Pirates of the Caribbean, 28 Days Later, Kill Bill, Master and Commander, and X2 (which I also went to see three times).

Nobody hates Reloaded because of the action scenes (well, except for the highway scene that takes forever). We hate it for the shitty writing which takes a dump all over the original.

(well, except for the highway scene that takes forever).

Eh, this feels like a later conclusion. None of my friends complained about it at the time. It was actually quite popular.

After the third, I think a lot of good will and rose tinting was stripped off.

It had some really cool scenes. It's much better than the third film.

I think both Matrix sequels are vastly underrated. Leaving out the weirdness that the Wachowski brothers put in because they were all into gay sex clubs, the movies are cut from the same cloth as the first movie. Also, Monica Bellucci.

Also, Monica Bellucci.

If the music video for "Love Don't Cost a Thing" by J-Lo hadn't awakened my budding sexuality, Bellucci's dress in Reloaded would have done.

The visual effects of Terminator 2 were mind-blowing on release and have aged incredibly well.

Much of this is because they were used so brilliantly. A killer machine made out of liquid metal doesn't have to look realistic as long as it looks cool and plausible. I believe they only used fancy CGI for the FX that look like FX (ie. time travel, T-1000 morphing, terminator vision) and did most of the rest with traditional techniques where the viewers are going to be much more critical about realism compared to what was achievable with CGI at the time. Contrast this with Jurassic Park where the dinosaurs look almost like upscaled rubber toys because it turns out that people have a whole lot more practical experience of how real animals move compared to killer robots.

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