and strangers will frequently “fill in the blanks” with their own assumptions

Yes, but a large number of strangers with different life experiences can help cancel out any one person’s personal baggage.

A little more context for anyone not aware. Epistolary just means it’s like the book equivalent of the Blair Witch Project. It claims to be written not by some outside author like most books, but to be the literal transcriptions of the characters’ diary entries, letters, news articles, and phonograph recordings. All of these are of course dated in-universe, with the first of Jonathan Harker’s diary entries taking place on 3rd May. So we’re reading through it as it happens.

Days 1 and 2 are very short, and there isn’t any entry on 6 May, so you’ve got plenty of time to catch up if you want to join in on 7th May.

Minor correction: the days don’t actually match up to “chapters” of the book. Chapter 1 is made up of 3, 4, and half of 5 May. Chapter 2 is the 2nd half of 5 May, 7 May, and the 1st half of 8 May. I’m not 100% sure as I’ve never read the book this way before, but I believe later on, doing it this way will actually mean we read it slightly out of the normal reading order, too, especially as relates to the news articles and shifting POVs.

Toolkit? Like a saddle bag? I almost mentioned in my earlier comment how that would be one of the more logical inclusions on a bike but how none of the things really looked like that.

I love this! The inclusion of the bike lock, the springs on the saddle, the brake wires. Really cool!

I’m curious, what are the three things attached to the seatpost? I’m guessing the bottom one might be a screw to allow sizing the saddle height correctly, and the top one vaguely looks like it might be a bike bell. But then what’s the middle one?

Good post.

Wrong community.

That depends? How good are your singing voices? And do you viciously attack innocent passers-by?

Wahoo absolutely does this.

I managed to find aoe3 and aom on the site by using a site-filtered Google search. Couldn’t find 1 or 2, but with both of those that I found being “remake”, I suspect the two I didn’t find would be the same.

It’s interesting, and perhaps highlights how vague the line is between remake and remaster. AoM I can see being called a remake (at a bit of a stretch), but 2 & 3 are pretty solidly remasters in my mind, due to being entirely in the original engine with just a bit of new QoL features and improved graphics added.

Oh that’s an interesting point. I noticed the timing of that event and even thought similar, but didn’t quite reach that conclusion.

And they updated some of the levelling to work more like Skyrim, because the Oblivion system sucked in comparison

Updated how exactly? Oblivion and Skyrim both have pretty serious flaws. I believe there are popular mods to fix the Oblivion system in a way that still feels like Oblivion, though it’s been a long time since I’ve read in to any of it.

Out of interest, how does that site classify Age of Empires Definitive Edition (and aoe2:DE and aoe3:DE) and Age of Mythology: Retold?

Ah interesting. I noticed those hints, but thought they were going in a different direction.

Re the context of when the book was written…I didn’t actually know it was based on a book, as I watched it. I did already know that as I wrote this review, but that was too late to shape my original interpretation of the film as I watched it.

Plus, I don’t really love it as an excuse. There are two possibilities as I see it. Either it worked in the book but didn’t translate well to screen, in which case they should have made the necessary changes to come up with something that did work. Or it didn’t work in the book and they should have taken the opportunity of the adaptation to improve upon it. It wouldn’t be the first time an adaptation significantly changed the source material.

with quite a bit of foreshadowing that he is going to be corrupted by a lust for power

Yeah I definitely saw this and was a little disappointed it didn’t amount to anything. I left it out because I wasn’t actually sure it was really there, or if I just read it into the film without serious evidence.

It’s like a 9/10 film for 85% that drops to a 6/10 right at the end

Those are almost the exact numbers I was gonna give it. I’d have said 8/10 down to 6/10.

Not a comparison I use lightly, I assure you.

Maybe that one politician a while back who wanted to redefine pi to equal 4 would be on this level.

There are so many ways to use fingers to count, while the one common in Europe the simplest one possible

But this isn’t about counting on fingers. It’s about counting fingers. As in, the fingers themselves are what’s being counted when you talk about your “middle finger”.

Which part of the ending can you see coming? The person who ends up being pope, I predicted based purely on narrative structure right from the beginning. The twist after he becomes pope? I never would have called it, so I’d love to know what the early clues are to that.

Personally, I wouldn’t have minded the ending if it hadn’t felt so rushed.

Yeah I also expect MS will see W11’s poor uptake (iirc, W10 actually increased market share over the last 12 months) and will see it as necessary to extend. Probably more to reduce the risk of bad press from a serious security incident, rather than because they’re afraid people will switch to Linux.

Sure, but we don’t say you have one middle finger, we talk about the two middle fingers. As in, one per hand. It’s not the middle of all your fingers, it’s the middle of the fingers on that hand.

We don’t count the gabs because that’s…not how counting things works. When delivering a bag of apples, you don’t count how many gaps between apples there are, you count the number of apples. You have to know that your second paragraph here is a stretch that would make a Republican lawmaker seem sensible, don’t you?

It’s pretty normal to count the thumb as a finger. I find it strange that you would not.

If you were asked “how many fingers do you have”, would you answer 8, or 10? Surely, everyone knows the answer is 10 (assuming no physical abnormalities)? On a fingering chart, music will instruct you to play a note with your thumb with the number “1” and your pinky with the number “5”.