It burns through it all quickly and none of it is particularly interesting.

I'm pretty sure all of the tagging and synopsis writing is done by a single intern who doesn't actually watch any of it.

I'd love to see an analysis of how frequently the word "irreverent" is used/tagged, and how often it's misused.

You... remove the tape? Electrical tape is like the easiest thing to take off in the world.

If you want to get pedantically technical, we can say that you need to either consume the carbohydrates that will break down specifically into glucose or foods that directly contain glucose itself, but you can't survive with literally 0 glucose.

While we don't need to consume added sugars or already simple glucose, fructose, maltose, or sucrose, we must consume enough carbohydrates that will break down into glucose to support brain function.

Your words specifically were

>There is no dietary need for sugar.

Which is simply untrue, unless your making the argument that we could mainline glucose infused saline or something to avoid eating it, but that's silly.

Given that this is /r/science, it's worth pointing out that glucose is a sugar.

We get enough sugars to sustain ourselves from natural sugars in the foods we eat and we don't need added sugars or "table sugar" to survive, but the sugars we need are still sugars.

Oh absolutely. We need some sugars in our diet, and the occasional gatorade is no more "unhealthy" than anything else. People just want to condense everything to "good" or "bad" as if there's no room for nuance when diet and health are so much more complicated than that.

Lets not put diet soda in the same category as gatorade/vitamin water and perpetuate the "diet soda gives you cancer/heart disease/whatever" misinformation. Diet soda is not a "health drink" by any measure despite "health food" already being a vague and meaningless term, but there's no free sugar (or any sugar) in it whereas drinks like gatorade are full of free sugars. This particular study isn't discussing sugar substitutes and their potential effects on long term health.

I think the fact that it did take up so much time is explicitly why it detracts from it.

For the majority of the hour we totally lost the plot and were watching something else. Maybe if they actually inserted some apocalypse into that hour it would have detracted less, but if you photoshopped the fence out of the background maybe five minutes of the whole thing still would have had anything to do with the setting and events of the show at large.

As someone else in another thread had said, you could've swapped the setting to a cabin in the remote woods instead of the fungus apocalypse and literally nothing else would have had to been changed about the whole flashback. It's like the whole apocalypse never happened for the entire flashback, it barely impacted them at all, and the one time it directly did (the raiders) they used it as a fake out two seconds later and surprise! Bill is totally fine from that gut shot while Frank is now dying of a terminal illness and they lived happily ever after.

Like there's a compelling love story being told here, but it sure as shit didn't have a thing to do with "The Last Of Us." beyond cribbing the setting and vague ideas of a couple minor characters then doing literally nothing relevant with either.

My vote is for the people who took it a step further, and are now arguing about it in the reddit comments.

This is the modern news cycle, it's all just outrage bait to get people riled up and talking shit about "the other team." Doesn't even matter if the topic at hand is factual as long as they can leverage it to rationalize being angry and attacking "the enemy."

Suspension of disbelief is a real thing.

They could've written in a unicorn that pisses refined gasoline and it would've made more sense than spending the whole time portraying "realistic survival techniques from a doomsday prepper" that don't add up at all.

It's the same problem people had in Game of Thrones in the last seasons where time didn't make any sense. A crow flies halfway across the continent and Dany comes to their rescue on dragonback overnight? If you're going to set up rules for your made up fantasy universe, you still need to follow those rules or it doesn't work.

I would argue that if you need an hour long segue that completely departs from the source material to prop up why the letter is important, then the letter wasn't important in the first place.

They could have done the same thing in half the time, and put better framing around the letter in the current timeline to make it just as important without watching Bill and Frank eat strawberries in the garden or have awkward sex.

We knew Joel respected Bill from literally two minutes of the whole hour long flashback, when they talked to each other directly. That could have easily been done a hundred other ways without the extended flashback.

I think the biggest condemning factor here is that yes, you could argue that the super long flashback did X and Y and Z, but the game also did all of those things for all of those characters without an hour long flashback about Bill & Frank's domestic life. When taking that into account it's hard not to frame the whole thing as "filler."

Was it bad? Aside from a handful of blatant plot holes that really stretch suspension of disbelief, no, it was not bad. The acting was solid and the characters were at least passingly interesting if romance is your thing. But it 100% felt like they just copy/pasted any random Lifetime Original movie into the middle of an episode of The Last Of Us. It was jarringly out of place and would have done better on it's own as a spinoff movie or something.

>This is such a weird criticism.

>When the power went out while at the hardware store, he went to the "New Bedford Plant" Natural Gas Plant and turned the gas back on assuming the reserves would last him in a town for for 1. He drives at the gates of the plant at full speed and cuts through the rest with bolt cutters.

Why would the gas even be off? And those plants don't just run themselves for 10 years with no issues, the supply would have dried up and there's no electricity for any of the mechanical functions that supply gas to work. They specifically zoomed in on him lighting the gas stove with a match, but he turned the electricity back on with the generator. He's conserving electricity to not use the electric pilot (its 2003, not 1886) but happy to keep everything else running 24/7/365 off the generator?

They literally live in that house for a decade as if all public works infrastructure didn't totally collapse and is working like normal simply because he flipped a switch at a plant miles away and poured whatever was left in a gas station into three oil drums. Hot showers, running water, gas, electricity, etc. It's total nonsense, none of that actually works that way and is a huge, frequent, and valid criticism of pretty much every piece of post-apocalyptic survivor media. The truck wouldn't have worked either in the last scene, the engine would have immediately seized when Joel tried to start it with decade old bad gas in the tank.

Does it make it "literally unwatchable" or any such nonsense? No, of course not, but that doesn't make it invalid criticism either.

>It depends on how long the generator lasts. But also Joel has been there many times, and might know how to refill it as part of his whole Handyman Builder thing. They've probably traded for fuel before.

A generator that size, powering a house that big, and an electric fence that's always on surrounding the whole town?

Even with minimal usage in the house, that's going to be burning 10+ gallons of gas an hour. Those three 100 gallon drums he filled up at the beginning of the episode would have lasted... about a day. Your average gas station like the one he took the gas from sells about 4000 gallons a day and is usually refilled daily or every other day. So assuming the gas station had a full reserve, he'd have been out of gas to run the generator in a little over two weeks on a generous estimate.

Ten years running that 24/7? Even putting aside the fact that after six months it's all moot and there's no more unspoiled fuel to scavenge or trade for, ten years is nonsense.

As for when Joel and Ellie showed up, unless the generator was topped off right before they died and it hasn't been more than 48 hours... there would be no electricity for any of it. If you'd like to say the generator was hard-line natural gas powered, we return to point 1 where that's just as equally nonsense.

And we know Joel and Ellie didn't fill it up and turn it on because the fence was powered when they entered the compound and they went directly to the house on camera, it's right next to the gate while the generator is out back. They'd have no reason to turn the generator on first if they didn't know Bill and Frank were dead and the fence was still working, so that doesn't add up.

>"I was never afraid before you showed up." He was afraid and made mistakes.

Running out into the road to stand under a street light and shoot at things you cant see is not "i'm afraid and made a mistake," it completely undermines his entire characterization. It's more nonsense.

>Also at no point is he shown to be a great hunter. He see him raising chickens and farming. His signature dish appears to be rabbit, and he's shown to be a trapper. None of that translates to shooting ability. It would then be notable that nowhere do we see a shooting range, or anywhere he can practice.

I'm not going to sit here and argue the semantics of whether or not trapping is a discipline of hunting. The man is literally a doomsday prepper with Don't Tread On Me banners hanging in his secret bunker next to his absurd collection of firearms.

We're not seriously going to sit here and pick apart an assumption that he doesn't know how to fire a gun, or that you don't stand in the open like a jackass when executing guerilla tactics against raiders, right?

But yeah, we clearly all just "obviously didn't watch the episode" or "don't get it" or whatever.

You mean the montage that completely ignores how gasoline and electricity actually work?

I mean, I'd sure love a natural gas stove that magically works off of electricity and raw crude oil! Or three cans of processed gasoline that can power a mansion-sized generator and a town-sized electric fence for 10+ years constantly when gas goes bad after about 6 months of sitting...

I wonder who kept filling that generator after the both died until Joel and Ellie showed up to find them? I mean, all the lights were still on but they've obviously decomposed and the leftover food on the table had gone rotten.

And remember when the crafty survivalist and skilled hunter stood out in the middle of the road shooting at people his traps were going to kill anyway until he conveniently got gut shot?

It's easy to pop off about how legitimate criticism is "lame" on the internet even when it's not. Conserving an entire liquor store of wine is really the only thing that would have feasibly worked in that whole episode.

If all you want is a lightbulb that turns on/off, sure, it's totally an option to do at the switch!

Most people getting into smart lighting want more than that though, and are using products like Phillips Hue to do different colors/temperatures, save lighting profiles for different activities: watching movies, playing video games, just hanging out, cool christmas party lights, synchronizing lighting throughout multiple rooms, making it match your music, all sorts of stuff. At that point it becomes more of a decorative hobby than just "lighting your house" as a goal.

> If true then turning off the circuit breaker would probably default every single one of them to locked.

Maybe, but that's super against fire code. Locks on doors in environments like these need to fail safe, not fail secure. Otherwise the building catches fire and loses power, and all the doors lock everyone inside to burn to death.

And also a super easy thing to fix for any locksmith that isn't totally useless. You can just rewire the door's circuit so there's no power to the strike. No power = no magnetism = unlocked door.

A locked breaker box is not anything a couple minutes with a crowbar isn't going to solve. It's made of shit quality sheet metal.

A government contract changing hands once in 10 years is pretty standard. Vendors get re-bid almost every time a contract comes up for renewal in these situations, there's a regulatory obligation given that it's being paid for with tax dollars.

It's also why most of these contracts get signed for such long terms. A lot changes in 10 years.

To be fair, a lot of electricians (and end users) dont know what the fuck they're doing with "smart" lightbulbs and the like.

If you put a smart bulb on a switch not made for a smart bulb, yeah, you're gonna fry it because you're constantly turning it off/on when it needs to always be "on" and is turned "off" via software.

When used properly, the reputable brands work pretty well.

That's not really a viable strategy, a liberal arts degree is going to be missing the vast majority of high level math and science prerequisites for a lot of STEM programs, and not teach any of the entry level specialized prereqs and would add years to the program. You can't just get a degree in whatever and then shotgun an entire 4 year STEM program at the end of it, it doesn't work that way. Not to mention how valuable getting involved with the professors and in the educational community can be for kickstarting your professional networking and opening opportunities.

In that situation they'd be far better off just going to a community college with a decent program for whatever they want, getting their associates in the relevant field, and transferring into a 4 year program from there.

Which hypotheticals aside, is entirely the point - you can't just assume someone is an entitled, wasteful brat for pursuing a specific educational path instead of the one that just happens to be "free." Hell, maybe they don't want to go to college at all and want to pursue a trade? Supporting your kid in their chosen field is not "indulgent permissive parenting," it's supporting your kid.

I mean... that's way too broad of a judgement there. It really depends on what they want to go to school for and what the school in question is. If they wanted to go to a good engineering school, for example, and I worked for a primarily liberal arts college without a real engineering program, it's not really a feasible option for them to attend.

Uh... the vast majority of higher education facilities have similar policies. Very few people are ever in a position to take advantage of them because the person working there usually doesn't have college-age kids who want to go to that specific school. It's one of those pretty perks on paper that costs the schools almost nothing.

You won't, but you weren't going to anyway at this point. They already made their money off of you, you're not the target audience anymore. However there's definitely people who are going to see this thread perpetuated by people like you and I, and go "oh yeah, that show was super big, maybe I should finally watch it. It can't be as bad as they say" or "Wasn't that based on a book? Everyone keeps talking about how different they are, maybe I should read it."

Statistically, most people don't finish watching long series or make it all the way through so their curiosity about why everyone's still talking about this dumpster fire of a series outweighs the fact that it'll likely never be finished or that the show's ending sucked.

In many ways he's likely better off not finishing them. If he finishes them, people will read them and bitch then stop talking about it when they move on to the next thing.

Meanwhile eight years later these GRRM threads still pop up daily. We're still talking about him, which translates into SEO, views, and ultimately purchases.

Yeah, it could've had more steamy underage rape-turned-enjoyment scenes, like the books!

Uh... wait... erm...

In all seriousness, there was a lot of weird cruft the series cut out from the books for the better. They streamlined certain plot points, cut some of the redundant character bloat, and steered clear of some of the more questionable content Martin shoehorned in there (presumably for "gritty" shock value) that didn't really serve much of a purpose anyway.

I dont think that's a fair comparison at all. Jordan was terminally ill and still desperately trying to finish his books at a regular cadence while literally dying. He also made extensive plans to have the works finished posthumously if he didn't make it.

There's literally no indication that Martin has written a word of this book in nearly a decade, and IIRC he's explicitly said if he kicks it then no one is to ever touch his works.