Mikko Rautalahti

It was always an execution. There's no moral difference between firing on the boat and firing at survivors.

If you shoot 11 random guys but two of them survive so you finish them off a little later, that's not where it gets nasty. It might be ugly but that's not where it crosses a line to murder.

The idea that the second strike on that boat was somehow extra awful is ludicrous. If the second strike was murder, so was the first one. Follow that thought through. They are all murder.

Yeah, that makes a huge difference. Just having that sense of richness in variety and is significant. Playing it, you can feel that there's stuff going on, you're not just walking through the funhouse and going through the motions.

(And ultimately, of course you are! But it doesn't feel that way.)

I think at the very elast, there's a difference between committing to quality and creative vision and committing to, I dunno, corporate advancement or the buffing of your own ego.

Not that these things are mutually exclusive. But.

But at the same time, I don't know that those stories are that different from the ones I hear from teams that produced a kind of mediocre open world action-adventure game that was the 10th iteration in the series or whatever. So, I mean... I'm not quite sure what conclusions to draw from that.

Yeah, I mean, I've worked with people who've worked at Rockstar and a lot of the stories I hear are harsh. I think that directorial vision comes at a cost and it's not necessarily the company that pays that cost. It's problematic.

That's exactly the kind of thing that gets cut or severely scoped down just about everywhere else, yeah! So maybe you go from a random encounter where somebody challenges you to a shooting match to a shooting gallery location you can visit. And that's not wrong... but it's also not the same.

Like, RDR2 is not made in an environment where some designer's tasked with with a bunch of side quests and then later on a writer is brought in to "story it up" and if the end result feels random or lackluster, too bad, we're way past the point in the pipeline where structural changes can be made.

It's not a Ubisoft game where people just churn out stuff. And I'm not trying to be shitty about Ubisoft games, but the difference in methodology and overall ethos is vast. You don't make a game like RDR2 by just building huge Jira pipelines and feeding assets into it until quests pop out, you know?

Yeah, whatever else you might say about the company, clearly they have a vision and make it possible for people to actually implement it. They take the work seriously. It's clearly not a factory mentality, there's an attempt to produce something of exceptional quality on all levels.

There are people who will be like "how could this happen?" and "what went wrong?" but you really have to understand that from the perspective of the IDF, this happened because it was the plan and nothing went wrong, everything went right. There's nothing exceptional about this. This is what they do.

I’ve named my fists Tug and Buster because MAN! Even settin’ on the crapper, they sure cut a mighty imposin’ image.

Johnson was just the shitty sheriff in Rebel Ridge last year! He's still got the chops for that. Costner's like five years younger. It's fine, a certain degree of crustiness just helps here, they've been butting heads for decades. Just two shitty guys of distinguished age making real bad decisions.

Ain't nobody learning lessons in this one!

Oh, yeah, neither of them is gonna have a good time.

And is there somebody who comes in and manipulates them out of whatever equilibrium they have and into an ill-advised conflict that gets way out of hand, Red Harvest style? You bet your sweet ass there is.

I'm not gonna lie, now I'm kind of looking for an excuse to write that thing...

And do both Johnson and Costner get to chew scenery and speechify, probably in ways that will come back to haunt them? You know it. Just two grizzly old iconic guys being charming and slick and kind of magnetic despite being like the very worst guys in their respective counties.

Maybe one of them is bigoted and abusive and really gets off on his power, but he's essentially kind of honest about it. The other one is a lot less abrasive and even-handed, but he's corrupt as shit, just grift on grift on grift. Both have huge egos and they hate each other so fucking much.

Having considered this issue carefully, I have come to the conclusion that we could really use a movie with Don Johnson and Kevin Costner starring as rival sheriffs whose feud gets out of hand. Just two charming, rakish authority figures who are deeply shitty people, one-upping each other.

I got this piece of spam. Man, when you're trying to get people to buy into your shitty NFT scheme on the tail end of the year 2025, you really are scraping the bottom of the ol' scam barrel.

No one at the rap battle will wait for me to type my prompts

Random NPCs being little weirdos is where I fucking LIVE, man. Some of the most fun parts of the job.

Having some shitty AI fart it out is like taking photos of the foods you like, putting them in a blender and then eating the resulting paste. And then wondering why people think you’re an idiot.

Fair enough!

I also would have accepted "because fuck you, that's why."

Why are you attacking that lady?

Extremely on brand!

Many, many years ago I and my roommates threw a party, and one guy pissed himself on purpose just to fuck with other people. The outrage, anger, and disgust directed at him wasn't because of the pee, it was because this asshole chose to do this and thought it was a good idea.

THAT is what this is.

Honestly, that's not even the bit that would make people think poorly of me. It's just the very concept of it -- that I'd want them to stop what they're doing just to hear my phone talk shit about the way somebody looks. Not that the insults and slurs would be great, but it's not even about that.

I'm about to go to a party. Like, literally, I'm leaving in an hour to go hang out with my friends and celebrate a birthday.

It would be utter social suicide for me to suddenly go like hey everybody hey uh hey everybody listen hey listen to my phone everybody oh my god wait it's gonna be NEXT LEVEL

So many of the Silver Age DC stories are really about self-inflicted misery. You could argue they were ahead of the curve there with their constant focus on people suffering because of their own poor judgment. Very relatable!

the rest of my life is gonna be every month or 2 getting a text or pm like "hey i saw your old tweet on ____ and it had a bunch of updoots and imbeciles arguing in the comments"