Peter Benjamin

Parker

The set of all integers is not larger than the set of all odd integers.

The set of all real numbers, on the other hand, is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality_of_the_continuum

Red button under the strip.

It’s because the people leaving negative reviews now are the opposite of haters.

We’re the people who still gave a damn, who were willing to put the effort to play the game, who found at least part of it entertaining enough to keep playing despite all the frustrations, who dared hope that the next quest or world or NPC would bring back the feeling of playing the old Bethesda games.

We’re the people who the game finally managed to break despite how much we tried to enjoy it. Who gave up in frustration after the last crash made us lose all the time we’d spent customizing our ship (my case), who lost the will to play after realising we knew what we’d find behind that corner or locked door because we’d already encountered them half a dozen times in exact copies of the same building in half as many planets, who after weeks of trying to find the same sense of wonder we’d found in previous Bethesda games finally gave up after the umpteenth unfulfilling quest bland generic NPC, or cookie cutter location.

And we’re the people who, even after all that, still had enough respect for a company that had once made games we’d loved not to post a negative review… until, instead of acknowledging the game’s faults and trying to fix them, Bethesda started attacking reviewers for their opinions and defending their poor design choices.

Shut up, Todd.

Your game might have been a 6/10 ten or fifteen years ago, but today it’s just outdated in every single aspect.

Not only that, but its characters and quests feel generic and uninspired even when compared to older Bethesda games, and the little background stories that made them great (I still remember that guy falling from the sky just out of Seyda Neen all these years later) are not only entirely absent, but their absence is highlighted by the sheer generic blandness and emptiness of the planets and the cookie cutter repetition of the locations you find randomly scattered on them (often without any consideration for the planet’s nature or environment; I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve facepalmed after finding an outdoors lounging area with sandwiches and whatnot in planets with no breathable atmosphere; and the time Gopher found life in a cookie cutter cave in Earth’s moon without the game acknowledging anything about it just made me feel all kinds of vicarious embarrassment for your game).

And to top that off there’s the bugs (I posted my negative review out of frustration after the last time the game crashed before I could save after spending way too long modifying my ship with that extremely poorly designed ship editor interface — though even that isn’t as bad as outposts; I entirely gave up on those after the first attempt), and Bethesda’s apparent absolute lack of interest in fixing them…

Which gets me to the main reason people are shitting on your game, your company, and you personally now, Todd: the sheer Elon Musk levels of lunacy you and your company have displayed in response to the first wave of negative reviews by telling the reviewers their opinions were wrong, and the fact that said lunacy apparently takes precedence over fixing the damn bugs.

This is no longer about a mediocre poorly written and lazily designed game running like shit on a decades old engine that should’ve been ditched after Morrowind, this is about Bethesda jumping the shark and losing any respect its customers might have once had for a company that used to produce great games. We gave you another chance after the horse armour debacle. We stood by you when your games became formulaic generic fantasy with Oblivion and Skyrim, because the stories were still good. We gave you many chances, because we remembered the good old times and we naively hoped they could come back. And then you showed your true colours (admittedly for the nth time, but hope is hard to break) and outright told us our genuine concerns were, against all evidence (in the year of games like Baldur’s Gate 3!) wrong.

Fuck you, Todd. You ruined it. And it’s quite possible Bethesda will never recover.

Seems like a reasonable demand.

Also, especially in Argentina’s case, because the other guys are literally the worst. ¹

¹ Except that this guy is somehow even more worst. But hey, at least it’s new ² worst.

² It’s not really new. Just the same old fascism ³, with a new shiny coat of paint. ⁴

³ Except somehow even more stupid and irrational than ever before.

⁴ It’s not really paint. ⁵

⁵ Shit. It’s shit. Brightly coloured shit, because of all the blood and other bodily fluids mixed in.

Majestic.

(Though probably not as much if you could smell it.)

And then, we could start selling meat of the “problem animals” that we have way too many of

For a moment there I was thinking you were about to advocate for cannibalism… (sadly, prions are terrifying.)

They’ve been sinking boats off the Iberian coast (possibly for fun, possibly for vengeance) for a few years now, so at least some seem to be trying…

“Premium”, possibly…?

Must be a tumour, then. 😞

Good, ban boomers too, then.

Yeah, it’s called clinical depression, it’s entirely normal, happens to everyone. 🤷‍♂️

Mandrake:

Yes, Jack?

Ripper:

Have you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water?

Mandrake:

Well, no I… I can’t say I have, Jack.

Ripper:

Vodka. That’s what they drink, isn’t it? Never water?

Mandrake:

Well I… I believe that’s what they drink, Jack. Yes.

Ripper:

On no account will a commie ever drink water, and not without good reason.

Mandrake:

Oh, ah, yes. I don’t quite… see what you’re getting at, Jack.

Ripper:

Water. That’s what I’m getting at. Water. Mandrake, water is the source of all life. Seven tenths of this earth’s surface is water. Why, you realize that… seventy percent of you is water.

Mandrake:

Uhhh God…

Ripper:

And as human beings, you and I need fresh, pure water to replenish our precious bodily fluids.

Mandrake:

Yes. chuckles nervously

Ripper:

You beginning to understand?

Mandrake:

Yes. chuckles. begins laughing/crying quietly

Ripper:

Mandrake. Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure grain alcohol?

Mandrake:

Well it did occur to me, Jack, yes.

Ripper:

Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?

Mandrake:

Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes.

Ripper:

Well do you now what it is?

Mandrake:

No. No, I don’t know what it is. No.

Ripper:

Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?

(…)

Ripper:

Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridated water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake. Children’s ice cream?

Mandrake:

Good Lord.

Ripper:

You know when fluoridation first began?

Mandrake:

No. No, I don’t, Jack. No.

Ripper:

Nineteen hundred and forty six. Nineteen fortysix, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your postwar commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard core commie works.

Mandrake:

Jack… Jack, listen, tell me, ah… when did you first become, well, develop this theory.

Ripper:

Well, I ah, I I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.

Mandrake:

sighs fearfully

Ripper:

Yes a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly: loss of essence.

Mandrake:

Yes…

Ripper:

I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women… women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.

— From Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove: or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

deleted by creator

Huh, I’m kind of surprised it didn’t come up with Terminator 2, which at least would fit the freezing and shattering bit.

Might be that the training set is too old; “That one with the fat dragon” got me Kung Fu Panda, because Po, while not a dragon, was fat.

Similar prompts (see my other replies to the OP) for older films seem to work, so Honour Among Thieves might be to recent. (Which would highlight one of the main issues with these large language models: they have to be periodically retrained with new data for them to remain accurate and practical.)

OK, last last one; “That one with Bill Murray and the gopher” got me Caddyshack, which I haven’t seen but does seem to be a better match than Groundhog Day, which is what I was going for (trying to see if the AI could figure out I was mixing my rodents; turns out there are too many Bill Murray rodent focused films for that to be a valid test, my bad).

I had to do it in a third browser 'cause the login prompt came back, though, so I won’t be doing any more attempts, between that and the GDPR prompt it’s pretty clear they don’t want people using their site. Shame, as the tool seems pretty good, but what can you do. 🤷‍♂️

OK, last try: (spoiler warning) “Turns out he was Jesus” got me The Man From Earth.

This shit would be good, if it weren’t for the login prompt.